Building vector search systems that handle billions of embeddings is one of the defining infrastructure challenges of the AI era. Unlike traditional search, which relies on inverted indexes and exact term matching, vector search operates in high-dimensional mathematical spaces where exact comparison becomes computationally prohibitive at scale. As of February 2026, production systems from Meta, LinkedIn, and specialized vector database vendors demonstrate that querying billion-scale vector datasets in under 100 milliseconds with 95%+ recall is achievable—but only through specific architectural decisions around sharding, approximate algorithms, and hardware optimization.
What Is Vector Search at Scale?
Vector search at scale refers to the infrastructure and algorithms required to perform similarity search across datasets containing hundreds of millions to billions of high-dimensional vector embeddings. These embeddings, typically generated by machine learning models like BERT, CLIP, or proprietary transformers, encode semantic meaning into dense numerical arrays ranging from 384 to 4,096 dimensions.
The core challenge stems from the “curse of dimensionality.” In high-dimensional spaces, traditional spatial indexing degrades to linear search performance. Exact nearest neighbor search requires comparing a query vector against every vector in the dataset—a brute-force approach with O(n) complexity that becomes prohibitively expensive when n exceeds even modest thresholds. For a dataset of 1 billion 768-dimensional vectors, a single exact query would require approximately 3 billion floating-point operations.
💡 Tip: Production vector search systems almost universally employ Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) algorithms, trading a small amount of recall (typically 95-99%) for orders-of-magnitude improvements in query latency and throughput.
How Does Distributed Vector Search Work?
Distributed vector search architectures decompose the problem across three dimensions: data partitioning (sharding), algorithmic approximation, and hardware acceleration.
Sharding Strategies for Vector Data
Horizontal partitioning, or sharding, is the foundational scaling mechanism for vector databases. Unlike relational databases where sharding follows simple key ranges, vector sharding must account for geometric properties:
Coarse-grained sharding partitions vectors by metadata attributes—user ID, content category, or tenant identifier. This approach works well when queries naturally filter by these attributes, as the system can route queries to specific shards rather than broadcasting to all nodes.
Geometric sharding uses clustering algorithms like k-means to partition the vector space itself. Vectors are assigned to shards based on proximity to cluster centroids, enabling efficient query routing. The tradeoff involves increased ingestion complexity, as each new vector must be classified against all centroids.
Random sharding distributes vectors uniformly across nodes. While this provides perfect load balancing, it requires broadcasting queries to all shards, introducing network overhead at billion-scale.
Production systems often employ hybrid approaches. Milvus, the open-source vector database, implements a multi-layer architecture where collections are partitioned across query nodes, each maintaining in-memory indexes for their assigned segments.1
Approximate Nearest Neighbor Algorithms
ANN algorithms form the computational core of scalable vector search, pre-computing data structures that enable sublinear search complexity.
| Algorithm | Index Build Time | Query Latency | Memory Usage | Recall (typical) | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flat (Brute Force) | O(n) | O(n) | 100% | 100% | Small datasets (<100K) |
| HNSW | O(n log n) | O(log n) | 150-300% | 95-99% | General purpose workloads |
| IVF | O(n × k) | O(√n) | 100-150% | 85-95% | Memory-constrained environments |
| IVF-PQ | O(n × k) | O(√n) | 5-20% | 75-90% | Billion-scale with limited RAM |
Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) graphs represent the current state-of-the-art for in-memory vector search. Introduced by Malkov and Yashunin in 2016, HNSW constructs a multi-layer graph where upper layers contain long-range connections for fast approximate routing and lower layers provide short-range connections for precise local search.2 Query complexity scales logarithmically—searching 1 billion vectors requires examining only thousands of nodes rather than the full corpus.
Inverted File Index (IVF) partitions the vector space into Voronoi cells using k-means clustering. At query time, the system identifies the nearest cells and performs exhaustive search within those cells only. IVF offers lower memory overhead than HNSW but suffers from “boundary problems” where queries near cell boundaries may miss nearest neighbors in adjacent cells.
Product Quantization (PQ) compresses vectors into compact codes by splitting high-dimensional vectors into sub-vectors, each quantized against a learned codebook. This reduces memory usage by 10-20×, enabling billion-scale indexes to fit in RAM. Faiss, Meta’s widely-adopted similarity search library, demonstrated PQ-based search on 1 billion vectors using just 25GB of memory while maintaining millisecond query latencies.3
Hardware Acceleration and GPU Scaling
GPU acceleration has transformed billion-scale vector search. The 2017 paper “Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs” demonstrated that optimized GPU implementations could construct k-NN graphs on 1 billion vectors in under 12 hours—work that previously required days on CPU clusters.4
Modern vector databases leverage GPU acceleration for both index construction and query execution. GPU-based k-selection algorithms operate at up to 55% of theoretical peak memory bandwidth, enabling 8.5× speedups over CPU implementations.
Why Does Vector Search Architecture Matter?
The architectural decisions in vector search systems directly impact business outcomes through latency, cost, and accuracy tradeoffs.
The Latency-Recall-Cost Triangle
Vector search operates within a fundamental constraint triangle: achieving low latency, high recall, and low cost simultaneously is impossible.
⚠️ Warning: Pre-filtering in vector search can significantly degrade performance. When filters exclude large portions of the dataset, HNSW graph traversal becomes inefficient. Some implementations automatically switch to brute-force search when filtered subsets fall below size thresholds.
Real-World Performance Benchmarks
As of early 2026, benchmark results provide concrete performance expectations:
- Pinecone reports 99th percentile latencies under 50ms for billion-vector collections with 99% recall@10
- Milvus demonstrated 79ms average latency on the 1-billion vector SIFT1B dataset using GPU-accelerated indices
- OpenSearch achieves sub-100ms queries on 500-million vector indexes using int8 quantization to reduce memory footprint by 4×
These benchmarks assume optimal hardware configurations—sufficient RAM to hold indexes, NVMe storage, and adequate network capacity for distributed coordination.
Separation of Storage and Compute
Leading vector databases separate storage persistence from query computation. Storage nodes maintain durable vector data, while query nodes load indexes into memory for search. This separation enables independent scaling: storage capacity can expand without adding query nodes, and query throughput can increase without replicating the entire dataset. Weaviate implements this pattern with its vector-first storage system, allowing horizontal scaling while maintaining query performance through intelligent caching.5
Hybrid Search Architectures
Production systems rarely rely solely on vector search. Hybrid architectures combine vector similarity with traditional keyword matching:
- Pre-filtering applies metadata constraints before vector search, reducing the candidate set
- Post-filtering runs vector search first, then applies constraints to results
- Integrated filtering modifies the ANN algorithm to respect constraints during traversal
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How many vectors can fit in a single server’s RAM? A: At 768 dimensions with 4-byte floats, 1 billion vectors require approximately 2.9GB of raw storage. However, HNSW indexes add 1.5-3× overhead, meaning 1 billion vectors typically require 5-10GB of RAM for the index alone. A 256GB server can theoretically hold 25-50 billion vectors, though practical limits are lower due to query working memory and system overhead.
Q: What recall rate should I target for production? A: Most production systems target 95-99% recall@10. Higher recall (99.5%+) is achievable but requires more aggressive search parameters, increasing latency by 2-5×. Applications where exact ranking matters may need higher recall than recommendation systems where diversity is acceptable.
Q: Should I use HNSW or IVF for my use case? A: Use HNSW for in-memory workloads requiring high recall and low latency—it’s the default choice for most applications under 100 million vectors. Use IVF variants (particularly IVF-PQ) when memory is constrained or datasets exceed available RAM by 10× or more.
Q: What are the cost implications of vector search at scale? A: As of February 2026, cloud-managed vector search costs range from $0.10-$0.50 per million queries depending on configuration, plus storage costs of $0.10-$0.25 per GB-month. Self-managed open-source solutions reduce query costs by 3-5× but require operational expertise.
Footnotes
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Milvus Documentation, “Architecture Overview,” 2025. ↩
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Malkov, Y.A. and Yashunin, D.A., “Efficient and robust approximate nearest neighbor search using Hierarchical Navigable Small World graphs,” arXiv
.09320, 2016. ↩ -
Jégou, H. et al., “Product quantization for nearest neighbor search,” IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2011. ↩
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Johnson, J., Douze, M., and Jégou, H., “Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs,” arXiv
.08734, 2017. ↩ -
Weaviate Documentation, “Vector Indexing,” 2025. ↩