# Benchmarks
> What CGraph measures, how, and the one result published so far.
[Source](https://open.nxtsoft.io/docs/cgraph/benchmarks)

Benchmarks are only useful when you can see the methodology. This page reports
the measurements CGraph publishes, states how they're produced, and is explicit
about what is not yet measured — no invented numbers.

## Adaptive gather: recall vs. token cost

The question adaptive gather answers is whether targeting the third hop buys back
most of the recall of a full 3-hop gather at a fraction of the token cost.

_Methodology: Retrieval evaluation measuring grade-2 recall against candidate-token cost. Adaptive gather keeps the full 2-hop core and expands the third hop only along query-relevant nodes; the baseline is a full 3-hop gather. Figures are the values published in the CGraph README; the harness and dataset live in the repository._

| Strategy | Grade-2 recall | Candidate tokens |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Adaptive third hop | +0.057 | +13% |
| Full 3-hop gather | (baseline recall) | +96% |

The takeaway: adaptive gather recovers most of the recall of a full third hop for
roughly one-seventh of the extra tokens.

## Reproducing a query benchmark

`graphd` includes a one-off benchmark mode to time a query against a built graph:

**benchmark a query**

```bash
graphd --benchmark-query --graph cgraph-out --query "PaymentProcessor"
```

This is the supported path for measuring query behavior on your own graph rather
than relying on a headline number.

## What is not yet published

Beyond the adaptive-gather result above, CGraph does not publish a full benchmark
suite (extraction throughput, query latency distributions, memory footprint,
scaling curves) in a form we can cite. Those tables are intentionally left
**pending** — this page will grow only with real, reproducible measurements and
their methodology, never with placeholder figures.

## Where to go next

- [Performance](/docs/cgraph/performance) — tuning guidance grounded in the same
  mechanics.
- [Context Packing](/docs/cgraph/context-packing) — the gather strategy the
  benchmark evaluates.