Database / Milvus Vector database Interview questions
What is a Replica in Milvus?
A Replica is an additional, independently loaded copy of a collection's segments onto a separate set of Query Nodes, used to increase both search throughput (more replicas can serve concurrent queries in parallel) and fault tolerance (if one replica's Query Nodes go down, another replica can continue serving search requests).
client.load_collection(collection_name="products", replica_number=2)
Replicas are specifically a read-scaling and availability mechanism, distinct from how Milvus handles write durability (which relies on the write-ahead log and object storage). Adding replicas increases the memory and compute cost of loading a collection proportionally, since each replica genuinely duplicates the loaded segment data onto its own set of Query Nodes rather than sharing the underlying loaded copy.
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