/scaling-query-volume
Guides Qdrant query volume scaling. Use when someone asks 'query returns too many results', 'scroll performance', 'large limit values', 'paginating search results', 'fetching many vectors', or 'high cardinality results'.
$ npx -y skills add qdrant/skills --skill scaling-query-volume --agent claude-codeHow it fires
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/scaling-query-volume
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Guides Qdrant query volume scaling. Use when someone asks 'query returns too many results', 'scroll performance', 'large limit values', 'paginating search results', 'fetching many vectors', or 'high cardinality results'.
SKILL.md
scaling-query-volume.SKILL.mdname: qdrant-scaling-query-volume
description: "Guides Qdrant query volume scaling. Use when someone asks 'query returns too many results', 'scroll performance', 'large limit values', 'paginating search results', 'fetching many vectors', or 'high cardinality results'."
Scaling for Query Volume
Problem: When a query has a large limit (e.g. 1000) and there are multiple shards (e.g. 10), naively each shard must return the full 1000 results — totaling 10,000 scored points transferred and merged. This is wasteful since data is randomly distributed across auto-shards.
Core idea
Instead of asking every shard for the full limit, ask each shard for a smaller limit computed via Poisson distribution statistics, then merge. This is safe because auto-sharding guarantees random, independent data distribution.
When it activates
- More than 1 shard
- Auto-sharding is in use (all queried shards share the same shard key)
- The request's limit + offset >= SHARD_QUERY_SUBSAMPLING_LIMIT (128)
- The query is not exact
Key tradeoff
The strategy trades a small probability of slightly incomplete results for a large reduction in inter-shard data transfer, especially for high-limit queries across many shards. The 1.2x safety factor and the 99.9% Poisson threshold keep the error rate very low — comparable to inaccuracies already introduced by approximate vector indices like HNSW.
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name: qdrant-scaling-query-volume description: "Guides Qdrant query volume scaling. Use when someone asks 'query returns too many results', 'scroll performance', 'large limit values', 'paginating search results', 'fetching many vectors', or 'high cardinality results'."
Scaling for Query Volume
Problem: When a query has a large limit (e.g. 1000) and there are multiple shards (e.g. 10), naively each shard must return the full 1000 results — totaling 10,000 scored points transferred and merged. This is wasteful since data is randomly distributed across auto-shards.
Core idea
Instead of asking every shard for the full limit, ask each shard for a smaller limit computed via Poisson distribution statistics, then merge. This is safe because auto-sharding guarantees random, independent data distribution.
When it activates
- More than 1 shard
- Auto-sharding is in use (all queried shards share the same shard key)
- The request's limit + offset >= SHARD_QUERY_SUBSAMPLING_LIMIT (128)
- The query is not exact
Key tradeoff
The strategy trades a small probability of slightly incomplete results for a large reduction in inter-shard data transfer, especially for high-limit queries across many shards. The 1.2x safety factor and the 99.9% Poisson threshold keep the error rate very low — comparable to inaccuracies already introduced by approximate vector indices like HNSW.
Agent skills for building with Qdrant vector search Skills encode deep Qdrant knowledge so coding agents can make the engineering decisions that determine whether vector search works well: quantization, sharding, tenant isolation, hybrid search, model
Repo: qdrant/skills
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