Perplexity Introduces Photon: A Rust-Based Retrieval Engine That Cuts p99 Latency From 800 ms to 65 ms

Perplexity launched Photon, a Rust-based retrieval engine that reduces p99 latency from 800 ms to 65 ms, powering all production search traffic and a new Fast Search API mode. Photon improves performance with adaptive posting lists, budgeted traversal, and batched async reads but is not open source.