hannoy 0.1.0
HNSW Approximate Nearest Neighbors in Rust, based on LMDB and optimized for memory usage
Requires Python: >=3.9

<p align="center"><img width="280px" title="this is a cowboy bebop ref" src="assets/hanoi_new.png"></a>
<h1 align="center">hannoy 🗼</h1>

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hannoy is a key-value backed [HNSW](https://www.pinecone.io/learn/series/faiss/hnsw/) implementation based on [arroy](https://github.com/meilisearch/arroy).

## Motivation
Many popular HNSW libraries are built in memory, meaning you need enough RAM to store all the vectors you're indexing. Instead, `hannoy` uses [LMDB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Memory-Mapped_Database) — a memory-mapped KV store — as a storage backend. This is more well-suited for machines running multiple programs, or cases where the dataset you're indexing won't fit in memory. LMDB also supports non-blocking concurrent reads by design, meaning its safe to query the index in multi-threaded environments.

## Features
- Supported metrics: [euclidean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean_distance#:~:text=In%20mathematics%2C%20the%20Euclidean%20distance,occasionally%20called%20the%20Pythagorean%20distance.), [cosine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosine_similarity#Cosine_distance), [manhattan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_geometry), [hamming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamming_distance), as well as quantized counterparts.
- Python bindings with [maturin](https://github.com/PyO3/maturin) and [pyo3](https://github.com/PyO3/pyo3) 
- Multithreaded builds using rayon
- Disk-backed storage to enable indexing datasets that won't fit in RAM using LMDB
- [Compressed bitmaps](https://github.com/RoaringBitmap/roaring-rs) to store graph edges with minimal overhead, adding ~200 bytes per vector
- Dynamic document insertions and deletions without full re-indexing

## Missing Features
- GPU-accelerated indexing

## Usage
### Rust 🦀
```rust
use hannoy::{distances::Cosine, Database, Reader, Result, Writer};
use heed::EnvOpenOptions;
use rand::{rngs::StdRng, SeedableRng};

fn main() -> Result<()> {
    let env = unsafe {
        EnvOpenOptions::new()
            .map_size(1024 * 1024 * 1024) // 1GiB
            .open("./")
    }
    .unwrap();

    let mut wtxn = env.write_txn()?;
    let db: Database<Cosine> = env.create_database(&mut wtxn, None)?;
    let writer: Writer<Cosine> = Writer::new(db, 0, 3);

    // build
    writer.add_item(&mut wtxn, 0, &[1.0, 0.0, 0.0])?;
    writer.add_item(&mut wtxn, 0, &[0.0, 1.0, 0.0])?;

    let mut rng = StdRng::seed_from_u64(42);
    let mut builder = writer.builder(&mut rng);
    builder.ef_construction(100).build::<16,32>(&mut wtxn)?;
    wtxn.commit()?;

    // search
    let rtxn = env.read_txn()?;
    let reader = Reader::<Cosine>::open(&rtxn, 0, db)?;

    let query = vec![0.0, 1.0, 0.0];
    let nns = reader.nns(1).ef_search(10).by_vector(&rtxn, &query)?.into_nns();

    dbg!("{:?}", &nns);
    Ok(())
}
```

### Python 🐍
```python
import hannoy
from hannoy import Metric
import tempfile

tmp_dir = tempfile.gettempdir()
db = hannoy.Database(tmp_dir, Metric.COSINE)

with db.writer(3, m=4, ef=10) as writer:
    writer.add_item(0, [1.0, 0.0, 0.0])
    writer.add_item(1, [0.0, 1.0, 0.0])

reader = db.reader()
nns = reader.by_vec([0.0, 1.0, 0.0], n=2)

(closest, dist) = nns[0]
```

## Tips and tricks
### Reducing cold start latencies
Search in an hnsw always traverses from the top to bottom layers of the graph, so we know a priori some vectors will be needed. We can hint to the kernel that these vectors (and their neighbours) should be loaded into RAM using [`madvise`](https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/madvise.2.html) to speed up search.

Doing so can reduce cold-start latencies by several milliseconds, and is configured through the `HANNOY_READER_PREFETCH_MEMORY` environment variable.

E.g. prefetching 10MiB of vectors into RAM.
```bash
export HANNOY_READER_PREFETCH_MEMORY=10485760
```


<!-- ## ideas for improvement -->
<!-- - keep a counter of most frequently accessed nodes during build and make those entry points (e.g. use centroid-like) -->
<!-- - merge upper layers of graph if they only have one element -->
<!-- - product quantization `UnalignedVectorCodec` -->
<!-- - cache layers 1->L in RAM (speeds up M*(L-1) reads) using a hash table storing raw byte offsets and lengths -->
<!-- - *threadpool for `Reader` to parallelize searching neighbours -->
<!---->
<!-- - change Metadata.entry_points from `Vec<u32>` to a `RoaringBitmap` to avoid manually deduplicating entries -->
<!---->
<!-- - TODO: check if using \alpha sng improves recall on incremental builds, e.g. with alpha=1.2 or something (single pass not twice over) -->
<!--   - id *does* but it also increases build time (if used for entire build). also not a magic bullet. -->
<!-- - ask what's wrong with a global pool for doing vector-vector ops and sending back to search thread ? -->
<!-- - could we also reindex points on levels > 0 during incremental build ? -->
<!-- - need to try building whole index, then deleting & inserting instead of 2-phase build -->