open-webui/backend
Classic298 95406fd28d
fix: build the pgvector ivfflat index once there are rows to cluster on (#30143)
ivfflat places its centroids by clustering the rows it can see when the index is built, so an index built on an empty table gets centroids that mean nothing, and everything inserted afterwards is filed against them. On a fresh install the index is created immediately after the table, before a single chunk exists, and it is never rebuilt, so that install keeps a permanently untrained index and quietly retrieves the wrong chunks. An install that upgraded into the version introducing the index is unaffected, its table already had rows.

The index is now created once the table holds 50 rows per list, the sample size ivfflat itself aims for. Below that, and until the next start, searches fall back to an exact scan, which is correct and costs about a millisecond at that size. hnsw is untouched, it builds its graph as rows are inserted and has nothing to train on. One trade-off: the build moves from the first start to that later one, so an instance that has grown large in between pays a one-time index build during startup.

Measured on PostgreSQL 17 and pgvector 0.8 with the default lists=100 and probes=1, 384 dimensions, recall@10 against an exact scan, varying only how many rows existed when the index was built:

| rows at build | 200 | 1000 | 2500 | 5000 | 20000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| recall@10 | 0.180 | 0.563 | 0.967 | 1.000 | 1.000 |

Through PgvectorClient.search on a 20000-row table, an index built as it is today scores 0.480 against 1.000 built after the rows arrive, at the same 5 ms. An existing install can repair its index with REINDEX INDEX idx_document_chunk_vector, measured to take it from 0.480 back to 1.000.

Fixes #30134
2026-09-18 10:37:25 -05:00
..
data refac: mv backend files to /open_webui dir 2024-09-04 16:54:48 +02:00
open_webui fix: build the pgvector ivfflat index once there are rows to cluster on (#30143) 2026-09-18 10:37:25 -05:00
.dockerignore fix: litellm config issue 2024-02-24 22:35:11 -08:00
.gitignore refac 2024-09-06 04:59:20 +02:00
dev.sh perf: allow disabling websocket per-message-deflate (#28613) 2026-08-24 18:46:07 -04:00
requirements-slim.txt refac 2026-09-12 20:09:21 -04:00
requirements.txt refac 2026-09-12 20:09:21 -04:00
start.sh refac 2026-09-06 16:48:30 -04:00
start_windows.bat chore: drop nltk, unused at the pinned versions (#29725) 2026-09-06 16:39:05 -04:00