My RAG pipeline had a bottleneck, and the fix turned out to be just simple math.
The problem
My retrieval pipeline for Uma Busca de Gelo e Fogo, a RAG system over the full A Song of Ice and Fire corpus (~66k paragraphs), follows a fairly standard hybrid retrieval setup:
Dense retrieval (ChromaDB, bge-m3)
→ BM25 sparse (BM25Okapi)








