Why is my vector search slow in production?

Common causes are an index not fully in memory, forcing disk reads, too-high ef_search or similar parameters that over-explore the graph, too-large top-k that forces the index to find more candidates than needed, highly selective filters that force many graph nodes to be checked, and insufficient replicas for query concurrency. Profile with database metrics to find the bottleneck. Solutions include adding memory, tuning index parameters, reducing k, adding payload or metadata indexes for filter efficiency, and scaling read replicas.