Performance

Shire is designed to index large monorepos quickly and answer queries instantly. This page documents benchmark methodology, results, and how to reproduce them.

Test repos

Benchmarks run against three real-world open-source monorepos covering a range of sizes and ecosystems:

Repo	Size	Packages	Symbols	Files	Primary languages
turborepo	small	400	10,686	5,451	Rust, TypeScript, Go
grafana	medium	28	35,104	14,054	Go, TypeScript
kubernetes	large	34	78,458	18,275	Go

Build performance

Full rebuild (no incremental cache), median of 4 iterations after a warmup run:

Repo	Median	Min	P95	Std dev
turborepo	571ms	525ms	678ms	58ms
grafana	1,150ms	1,025ms	1,172ms	58ms
kubernetes	1,703ms	1,607ms	1,897ms	108ms

Build time scales roughly linearly with symbol count. The pipeline is parallelized with rayon across packages and files, with batched multi-row SQLite inserts within explicit transactions.

Incremental builds are significantly faster – only packages with changed source files are re-extracted, and an mtime pre-check skips SHA-256 computation entirely for untouched packages.

Query performance

Median latency over 100 iterations per query:

Query	Small	Medium	Large
`search_symbols("parse")`	0.09ms	0.09ms	0.04ms
`search_symbols("Config")`	0.20ms	0.29ms	1.01ms
`search_files("mod")`	0.05ms	0.03ms	0.04ms
`search_files("test")`	0.07ms	0.60ms	1.99ms
`list_packages(None)`	0.11ms	0.01ms	0.01ms

All queries use SQLite FTS5 full-text search with unicode61 tokenizer and prefix indexes. Query latency depends primarily on result set size, not total index size.

Reproducing benchmarks

Shire includes an autoresearch binary for reproducible benchmarking.

Setup

Run the benchmark repo setup script to clone and prepare the test repos:

scripts/setup-bench-repo.sh

This clones the three repos into ~/.cache/shire-bench/ and creates a shire.toml in each.

Running benchmarks

# Build the benchmark binary
cargo build --release --bin autoresearch

# Run build benchmarks (all repos)
cargo run --release --bin autoresearch -- --phase build

# Run query benchmarks (all repos)
cargo run --release --bin autoresearch -- --phase query

# Filter by repo size
cargo run --release --bin autoresearch -- --phase build --size small

# Point at a specific repo
cargo run --release --bin autoresearch -- --phase build --repo /path/to/repo

Build benchmarks run 5 iterations (1 warmup + 4 measured) per repo. Query benchmarks run 100 iterations per query. Results are printed as JSON to stdout.

Environment notes

Results vary by machine (CPU, disk speed, available memory)
Close other applications for more stable measurements
The warmup iteration primes filesystem caches and SQLite page cache
Numbers in this document were captured on an Apple M-series Mac

Keyboard shortcuts

Shire