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Self-hosted note server skips search engine for RAM-based scan

The author of vellum MCP, a self-hosted server for markdown notes, opted against using traditional search engines like Bleve or vector indexes. Instead, vellum MCP performs a ranked scan of notes held in RAM, which starts in approximately 50 milliseconds and returns results in under a millisecond for a vault of 2,000 notes. This approach avoids the overhead of building and maintaining a separate index, managing dependencies, and incurring costs associated with embedding models for vector search. AI

IMPACT This approach offers a potentially more efficient method for managing personal knowledge bases, avoiding the costs and complexities of traditional search indexing.

RANK_REASON The item discusses a specific technical implementation choice for a self-hosted tool, focusing on optimization rather than a new release or significant industry trend.

Read on dev.to — MCP tag →

AI-generated summary · Google Gemini · from 1 sources. How we write summaries →

Self-hosted note server skips search engine for RAM-based scan

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The item discusses a specific technical implementation choice for a self-hosted tool, focusing on optimization rather than a new release or significant industry trend.
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COVERAGE [1]

  1. dev.to — MCP tag TIER_1 English(EN) · Tomas Grasl ·

    My note server has no search engine. Search still answers in 0.4 ms.

    <p><a href="https://github.com/freema/vellum" rel="noopener noreferrer">vellum MCP</a> is a self-hosted server over a folder of markdown, your agent's memory as plain <code>.md</code> files you own. Search is the feature everyone expects to be "solved" by a library: bolt on <a hr…