Zvec is engineered for speed, scale, and efficiency — and has been battle-tested across demanding production workloads within Alibaba Group. This page presents benchmark results demonstrating Zvec's performance under various workloads and configurations, using VectorDBBench with Cohere 1M and 10M datasets.
Zvec is an open-source, in-process vector database — lightweight, lightning-fast, and designed to embed directly into applications. Built on Proxima (Alibaba's battle-tested vector search engine), it delivers production-grade, low-latency, scalable similarity search with minimal setup.
This article explains the internal workings of vector databases, highlighting that they don't perform a brute-force search as commonly described. It details algorithms like HNSW, IVF, and PQ, the tradeoffs between recall, speed, and memory, and how different RAG patterns impact vector database usage. It also discusses production challenges like filtering, updates, and sharding.
