All Products
Search
Document Center

OpenSearch:Quantized clustering configurations

Last Updated:Apr 01, 2026

Configure quantized clustering (QC) index behavior through two parameter groups: QcBuilder controls how the index is built, and QcSearcher controls how queries are executed at runtime.

  • QcBuilder parameters are set at index-build time and cannot be changed without rebuilding the index.

  • QcSearcher parameters can be adjusted at any time without rebuilding the index.

QcBuilder

QcBuilder parameters control the offline index-building process, including training data volume, parallelism, cluster structure, and quantization.

ParameterTypeDefaultDescription
qc.builder.train_sample_countuint320Number of documents used as training data. Set to 0 to use all documents as training data.
qc.builder.thread_countuint320Number of threads used during index building. Set to 0 to use all available CPU cores on the OpenSearch Vector Search Edition instance.
qc.builder.centroid_countstringOptionalNumber of centroids for clustering. Leave blank to let the system infer an appropriate count automatically—recommended for most cases. To configure manually, use a plain integer for a single-level cluster (for example, 1000) or separate levels with an asterisk (*) for hierarchical clusters (for example, 100*100). For hierarchical clusters, set a higher centroid count at the first level than at subsequent levels: the first level contributes 10 times as many data points to training as each subsequent level, so more centroids at the first level yields better results.
qc.builder.quantizer_classstringNoneQuantizer used to compress index data. Omit this parameter to skip quantization. Valid values: Int8QuantizerConverter, HalfFloatConverter, DoubleBitConverter. A quantizer typically reduces index size and improves query speed, but may reduce retrieval accuracy. If your use case requires high recall, evaluate retrieval quality before using this parameter in production.
qc.builder.quantize_by_centroidboolfalseSpecifies whether to perform quantization based on centroids. Takes effect only when qc.builder.quantizer_class is set to Int8QuantizerConverter.

QcSearcher

QcSearcher parameters control query-time behavior and can be updated without rebuilding the index.

ParameterTypeDefaultDescription
qc.searcher.scan_ratiofloat0.01Fraction of all documents scanned during a query. Determines max_scan_num using the formula: max_scan_num = total documents × scan_ratio.
qc.searcher.brute_force_thresholdint1000Document count below which the index falls back to brute force search instead of approximate nearest-neighbor search.