Benchmarks#

Benchmarking USearch#

Hyper-parameters#

All major HNSW implementation share an identical list of hyper-parameters:

connectivity (often called M),
expansion on additions (often called efConstruction),
expansion on search (often called ef).

The default values vary drastically.

Library	Connectivity	EF @ A	EF @ S
`hnswlib`	16	200	10
`FAISS`	32	40	16
`USearch`	16	128	64

Below are the performance numbers for a benchmark running on the 64 cores of AWS c7g.metal “Graviton 3”-based instances. The main columns are:

Add: Number of insertion Queries Per Second.
Search: Number search Queries Per Second.
Recall @1: How often does approximate search yield the exact best match?

Different “connectivity”#

Vectors	Connectivity	EF @ A	EF @ S	Add, QPS	Search, QPS	Recall @1
`f32` x256	16	128	64	75’640	131’654	99.3%
`f32` x256	12	128	64	81’747	149’728	99.0%
`f32` x256	32	128	64	64’368	104’050	99.4%

Different “expansion factors”#

Vectors	Connectivity	EF @ A	EF @ S	Add, QPS	Search, QPS	Recall @1
`f32` x256	16	128	64	75’640	131’654	99.3%
`f32` x256	16	64	32	128’644	228’422	97.2%
`f32` x256	16	256	128	39’981	69’065	99.2%

Different vectors “quantization”#

Vectors	Connectivity	EF @ A	EF @ S	Add, QPS	Search, QPS	Recall @1
`f32` x256	16	128	64	87’995	171’856	99.1%
`f16` x256	16	128	64	87’270	153’788	98.4%
`f16` x256 ✳️	16	128	64	71’454	132’673	98.4%
`i8` x256	16	128	64	115’923	274’653	98.9%

As seen on the chart, for f16 quantization, performance may differ depending on native hardware support for that numeric type. Also worth noting, 8-bit quantization results in almost no quantization loss and may perform better than f16.

Utilities#

Within this repository you will find two commonly used utilities:

cpp/bench.cpp the produces the bench_cpp binary for broad USearch benchmarks.
python/bench.py and python/bench.ipynb for interactive charts against FAISS.

To achieve best highest results we suggest compiling locally for the target architecture.

cmake -B ./build_release -USEARCH_BUILD_BENCH_CPP=1 -DUSEARCH_BUILD_TEST_C=1 -DUSEARCH_USE_OPENMP=1 -DUSEARCH_USE_SIMSIMD=1
cmake --build ./build_release --config Release -j
./build_release/bench_cpp --help

Which would print the following instructions.

SYNOPSIS
        ./build_release/bench_cpp [--vectors <path>] [--queries <path>] [--neighbors <path>] [-b] [-j
                                  <integer>] [-c <integer>] [--expansion-add <integer>]
                                  [--expansion-search <integer>] [--native|--f16quant|--i8quant]
                                  [--ip|--l2sq|--cos|--haversine] [-h]

OPTIONS
        --vectors <path>
                    .fbin file path to construct the index

        --queries <path>
                    .fbin file path to query the index

        --neighbors <path>
                    .ibin file path with ground truth

        -b, --big   Will switch to uint40_t for neighbors lists with over 4B entries
        -j, --threads <integer>
                    Uses all available cores by default

        -c, --connectivity <integer>
                    Index granularity

        --expansion-add <integer>
                    Affects indexing depth

        --expansion-search <integer>
                    Affects search depth

        --native    Use raw templates instead of type-punned classes
        --f16quant  Enable `f16_t` quantization
        --i8quant   Enable `int8_t` quantization
        --ip        Choose Inner Product metric
        --l2sq      Choose L2 Euclidean metric
        --cos       Choose Angular metric
        --haversine Choose Haversine metric
        -h, --help  Print this help information on this tool and exit

Here is an example of running the C++ benchmark:

./build_release/bench_cpp \
    --vectors datasets/wiki_1M/base.1M.fbin \
    --queries datasets/wiki_1M/query.public.100K.fbin \
    --neighbors datasets/wiki_1M/groundtruth.public.100K.ibin

./build_release/bench_cpp \
    --vectors datasets/t2i_1B/base.1B.fbin \
    --queries datasets/t2i_1B/query.public.100K.fbin \
    --neighbors datasets/t2i_1B/groundtruth.public.100K.ibin \
    --output datasets/t2i_1B/index.usearch \
    --cos

Optional parameters include connectivity, expansion_add, expansion_search.

For Python, jut open the Jupyter Notebook and start playing around.

Datasets#

BigANN benchmark is a good starting point, if you are searching for large collections of high-dimensional vectors. Those often come with precomputed ground-truth neighbors, which is handy for recall evaluation.

Dataset	Scalar Type	Dimensions	Metric	Size
Unum UForm Creative Captions	float32	256	IP	3 GB
Unum UForm Wiki	float32	256	IP	1 GB
Yandex Text-to-Image Sample	float32	200	Cos	1 GB

Microsoft SPACEV	int8	100	L2	93 GB
Microsoft Turing-ANNS	float32	100	L2	373 GB
Yandex Deep1B	float32	96	L2	358 GB
Yandex Text-to-Image	float32	200	Cos	750 GB

ViT-L/12 LAION	float32	2048	Cos	2 - 10 TB

Luckily, smaller samples of those datasets are available.

Unum UForm Wiki#

mkdir -p datasets/wiki_1M/ && \
    wget -nc https://huggingface.co/datasets/unum-cloud/ann-wiki-1m/resolve/main/base.1M.fbin -P datasets/wiki_1M/ &&
    wget -nc https://huggingface.co/datasets/unum-cloud/ann-wiki-1m/resolve/main/query.public.100K.fbin -P datasets/wiki_1M/ &&
    wget -nc https://huggingface.co/datasets/unum-cloud/ann-wiki-1m/resolve/main/groundtruth.public.100K.ibin -P datasets/wiki_1M/

Yandex Text-to-Image#

mkdir -p datasets/t2i_1B/ && \
    wget -nc https://storage.yandexcloud.net/yandex-research/ann-datasets/T2I/base.1B.fbin -P datasets/t2i_1B/ &&
    wget -nc https://storage.yandexcloud.net/yandex-research/ann-datasets/T2I/base.1M.fbin -P datasets/t2i_1B/ &&
    wget -nc https://storage.yandexcloud.net/yandex-research/ann-datasets/T2I/query.public.100K.fbin -P datasets/t2i_1B/ &&
    wget -nc https://storage.yandexcloud.net/yandex-research/ann-datasets/T2I/groundtruth.public.100K.ibin -P datasets/t2i_1B/

Yandex Deep1B#

mkdir -p datasets/deep_1B/ && \
    wget -nc https://storage.yandexcloud.net/yandex-research/ann-datasets/DEEP/base.1B.fbin -P datasets/deep_1B/ &&
    wget -nc https://storage.yandexcloud.net/yandex-research/ann-datasets/DEEP/base.10M.fbin -P datasets/deep_1B/ &&
    wget -nc https://storage.yandexcloud.net/yandex-research/ann-datasets/DEEP/query.public.10K.fbin -P datasets/deep_1B/ &&
    wget -nc https://storage.yandexcloud.net/yandex-research/ann-datasets/DEEP/groundtruth.public.10K.ibin -P datasets/deep_1B/

Arxiv with E5#

mkdir -p datasets/arxiv_2M/ && \
    wget -nc https://huggingface.co/datasets/unum-cloud/ann-arxiv-2m/resolve/main/abstract.e5-base-v2.fbin -P datasets/arxiv_2M/ &&
    wget -nc https://huggingface.co/datasets/unum-cloud/ann-arxiv-2m/resolve/main/title.e5-base-v2.fbin -P datasets/arxiv_2M/

Profiling#

With perf:

# Pass environment variables with `-E`, and `-d` for details
sudo -E perf stat -d ./build_release/bench_cpp ...
sudo -E perf mem -d ./build_release/bench_cpp ...
# Sample on-CPU functions for the specified command, at 1 Kilo Hertz:
sudo -E perf record -F 1000 ./build_release/bench_cpp ...
perf record -d -e arm_spe// -- ./build_release/bench_cpp ..

Caches#

sudo perf stat -e 'faults,dTLB-loads,dTLB-load-misses,cache-misses,cache-references' ./build_release/bench_cpp ...

Typical output on a 1M vectors dataset is:

       255426      faults
 305988813388      dTLB-loads
   8845723783      dTLB-load-misses          #    2.89% of all dTLB cache accesses
  20094264206      cache-misses              #    6.567 % of all cache refs
 305988812745      cache-references

  8.285148010 seconds time elapsed

500.705967000 seconds user
  1.371118000 seconds sys

If you notice problems and the stalls are closer to 90%, it might be a good reason to consider enabling Huge Pages and tuning allocations alignment. To enable Huge Pages:

sudo cat /proc/sys/vm/nr_hugepages
sudo sysctl -w vm.nr_hugepages=2048
sudo reboot
sudo cat /proc/sys/vm/nr_hugepages