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RAG Latency Budget: Sub-Second Design (EXPLAINED)

Scenario BasedRAGHard25 min read

Hard RAG interview question on rag latency budget: sub-second design — architecture, trade-offs, eval, and production patterns.

TL;DR — Quick Answer

Allocate budget: embed (~20ms), ANN (~50ms), rerank (~100ms), LLM TTFT (~300ms+). Hit sub-second perceived latency via caching, regional indexes, lightweight rerankers, streaming tokens, and skipping RAG when retrieval scores are weak.

The Interview Question

Explain rag latency budget: sub-second design. How would you design, implement, and evaluate this in a production RAG system? Discuss trade-offs and failure modes.

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