Is Document Parsing the Real Bottleneck in Your RAG System?

-R-I-k- · reddit · 2026-08-27

A Reddit discussion highlights a common oversight in RAG systems: when performance lags, engineers often blame chunking, embeddings, or retrieval algorithms. However, the root cause frequently lies earlier in the pipeline.

If the parser destroys table structures, heading hierarchies, or reading order, the retrieval system is forced to work with corrupted input from the start. The author asks the community how often they have found the ingestion/parsing layer to be the actual bottleneck.

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