Scale & Cost Targets
Performance targets, latency budgets, and cost expectations for the IMPP registry and verification pipeline.
Scale & Cost Targets
This page documents the performance and cost targets for IMPP's core operations. These are design goals for the current protocol version (0.5).
Verification Pipeline
| Operation | Target Latency | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Schema validation | under 1s | Local, no network |
| Steganography detection | under 30s | Statistical analysis on artifact content |
| Overfit probe | under 60s | Requires held-out test set evaluation |
| Negative transfer probe | under 120s | Attaches to baseline agent and benchmarks |
| Freshness check | under 1s | Timestamp comparison |
| Full pipeline (all probes) | under 5 min | End-to-end, including queue time |
| Certificate issuance | under 2s | Ed25519 signing after probes pass |
Registry Operations
| Operation | Target Latency | Notes |
|---|---|---|
impp install (single artifact) | under 10s | Download + local cache |
impp search | under 500ms | Full-text search across registry |
impp verify --offline | under 100ms | Local Ed25519 signature check |
impp publish (upload) | under 5s | Artifact upload before pipeline starts |
Artifact Size Limits
| Constraint | Limit | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Max artifact content | 1 MB | Keeps verification fast, fits in model context |
| Max token count | 128K tokens | Upper bound for largest model contexts |
| Max sections per artifact | 256 | Practical limit for retrieval indexing |
| Min content length | 100 tokens | Below this, the artifact has no meaningful knowledge |
Cost Model
IMPP aims to keep verification costs low enough that publishing is accessible:
| Tier | Monthly Limit | Verification Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 50 artifacts | $0 |
| Publisher | Unlimited | Per-artifact fee (TBD) |
| Enterprise | Custom | Volume pricing |
The free tier covers individual researchers and small teams. Verification cost is dominated by the negative transfer probe (requires model inference).
Self-Hosting
Organizations can run a private IMPP registry with their own verification infrastructure. Self-hosted registries have no artifact limits but require:
- Compute for adversarial probes (GPU recommended for negative transfer)
- Storage for artifact content and certificates
- An Ed25519 key pair for certificate signing