qdrant / qdrant/fastembed

[Question] on an M2 Max FastEmbed is way slower than SentenceTransformers

Open
#535 6 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Dominant language
Python
Stars
3.2k
Forks
248
Avg merge
4d 8h
Merged PRs (30d)
4

Description

I'm comparing embedding performances comparing FastEmbed vs SentenceTransformers, and in my experiment, it turns out that FastEmbed is way slower than SentenceTransformers.
See a complete working example at my GitHub repo
Even if I disable GPU for SentenceTransformers (utils.py --> _pick_device --> make it return "cpu" only) it is still way faster than Fastembedd.

Can someone take a look at it? Maybe I'm doing something wrong.

Tested on an M2 Max 32Gb

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by running the complete working example in the linked qdrant-sample repository and inspect utils.py, especially _pick_device, as described in the issue. Compare FastEmbed with SentenceTransformers on the M2 Max under CPU-only settings. Done means identifying whether the comparison is configured correctly and documenting the cause of the performance difference.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
machine-learning, performance
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.