# `[2026-09-25]` TEI adopted as the fleet embed/rerank engine; esh-ml1 is the sole backend; fv-ml1 seats retired

**Prime's rulings (2026-09-25):**
- Utility seats move off fv-ml1 to a utility host like esh-ml1, accepting slower
  service; the Blackwells are kept for higher-requirement work.
- **parakeet STAYS on fv-ml1** (real-time chat path, every ms counts).
- **"TEI is embed/reranker server for esh-ml1 and the FLEET in general, in
  future."**
- fv-ml1 retires both embed + rerank once esh-ml1 is up. A **second RTX 2000 is
  coming to the fleet soon**; until then embed/rerank has one backend (accepted).

**Evidence chain:** speed A/B vs fv-ml1 (single queries a wash, bulk 3–10×
slower on the Ada); whole-novel test (*The Stand*, 12,814 paragraphs) through
the gateway ~12 min one per request on either site, because the gateway is the
bottleneck; TEI bake-off (`docs/pfi/embed-rerank-tei-vs-vllm-bakeoff.md`):
matches vLLM vectors, no re-embed, slower on bulk, much lighter. Dvalin
(Grok research peer) reviewed: agree with caveats. Two caveats were actioned:
fail-closed truncation (TEI's default silently embedded a 16,384-token prefix of a
40k input and returned 200) and nevermore's 0.3 rerank threshold (0 flips in 2,000
scores; low sensitivity, since few scores sit near 0.3).

**Cut-over, 0820–0830 PT:**
1. esh-ml1: vLLM pair down, TEI `tei-embed` :8001 + `tei-rerank` :8013 up (same
   ports). The old `.env` is kept as `.env.vllm-retired-2026-09-25`. The vLLM image
   (~30 GB) is kept in case the reward classifier (vLLM-only) moves here.
2. Gateway: `qwen3-embedding` → esh-ml1 only (`hosted_vllm/`, unchanged
   address); `reranker` → **`huggingface/`** provider (hosted_vllm 422s on TEI's
   `texts` body); `order` fields removed; LiteLLM restarted (~58 s). The DB
   alias `reranker-a3-bge-v2-m3` was PATCHed to the same TEI target.
3. Verified through the gateway against the still-running FV seats: embed
   cosine median 0.999927 / min 0.999881 (n=203); rerank top-1/top-3 29/30 (2 of
   30 lists had a duplicate-source tie; the disagreeing query wasn't logged).
4. **No direct (non-gateway) consumers existed**: per day, fv-ml1 seat POSTs =
   gateway spend-log rows exactly (09-20→09-24). After the repoint, the only FV hits
   were my own verification calls.
5. fv-ml1: `vllm-embed` + `vllm-rerank-a3` stopped and removed; `stacks/vllm`
   compose + `.env.example` updated (reward + coder untouched, 10–11 days up);
   GPU 1 93,086 → 86,956 MiB (~6.1 GB freed).

**Open:** esh-ml1 is now load-bearing with no monitoring (no Beszel, Kuma or
Homepage). Next: "what else moves". vllm-reward (9.2 GB, vLLM-only) is the
candidate and fits beside TEI's ~2.6 GB on 16 GB; vllm-coder (6.3 GB) is
latency-sensitive.