From Zero to Production RAG: Practitioner Documents Every Failure at 309 Points — LlamaIndex RAM Overflow, 54% File Reduction Fix

Andros Fenollosa / Hacker News·medium signal

A developer with zero RAG experience documents building a production system against hundreds of gigabytes of unstructured technical documents on Azure — LlamaIndex overflowed laptop RAM within minutes, forcing a complete architecture rethink. The fix: a file filtering pipeline that excluded simulation files, CSVs, and JSONs, cutting indexable files by 54% and eliminating memory issues. At 309 points and 94 comments on HN, practitioners are sharing their own RAG war stories in the comments.