For about a day I thought AgentRAM was slow in a way I couldn’t fix.
The whole pitch of the thing is that it’s simple. A memory API for AI agents, one call to store, one to recall, no vector database, no embeddings, no model sitting in the request path adding half a second every time. The entire reason to pick it over something heavier is that it should feel instant. So when a plain store-then-recall started taking three seconds, it wasn’t just a bug. It felt like the premise was wrong.
Three seconds. For a key-value read. I want to walk through how I chased it, because I went after the wrong suspect twice before I found the real one, and the real one was almost boring.
First suspect: my own code
The obvious thing to blame is your own code, and usually you’re right. So I read the request path line by line. Every step that touched the database was a single operation. Nothing looped. Nothing waited on anything it didn’t need. There was no query hiding inside a helper that ran ten more, no accidental full scan, no work being done twice. I counted the trips to the database on one hand, and every one of them had a reason to be there.
