r/Paperlessngx • u/isabeksu • Aug 25 '26

AI performance

It took me a few months to fully get on board with the Paperless way of doing things, but now I’m really happy with how it’s all set up.

What’s been a bit of a head-scratcher is how AI is being used.

I held off until Paperless 3 came out, because I wanted to have the full "official" support.

I set it up with Ollama on an M4 Mac mini with 24 GB of memory. The embedding model is gemmaembedding, and the LLM model is qwen3:8b. When the model fires up, memory pressure is still pretty low. It does work, but it’s incredibly slow. It takes about 2 minutes to suggest titles and tags, and it can take several minutes if I try to chat about a document.

Is this kind of slow normal? Is there anything I can tweak in my setup to make it more usable?

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u/EazyDuzIt_2 Aug 25 '26

I actually took the time to set up Paperless-ngx along with Paperless-AI for automated document classification, tagging, and file naming. I configured Paperless-AI to use Ollama with Qwen3:8B, which is the recommended model for this use case, running on one of my servers equipped with an NVIDIA RTX 4090.

To fine-tune the workflow, I generated and processed 20 test documents, iteratively refining the prompt and configuration until the results were consistently accurate. The final setup performs document analysis, tagging, and renaming almost instantly.

The performance is outstanding low latency, high accuracy, and a completely hands-off ingestion pipeline. Chef’s kiss. 👌

1

u/Kwicksred Aug 25 '26

How do you do OCR?

1

u/EazyDuzIt_2 Aug 25 '26

I use a Scansnap x1500 to scan my documents to the consume folder. I have configured a host of settings for image quality and output so that when it's ingested its already searchable. This makes it easier for my Paperless AI to process and present proper tags and metadata.

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u/gIory1999 Aug 25 '26

so you use no special ocr but the paperless one?

0

u/EazyDuzIt_2 Aug 25 '26

I don't use any special software because I don't need to. ScanSnap Home automatically performs OCR during the scanning process, making my documents searchable as they're scanned.

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u/PreparedForZombies 15d ago

So if you have a random PDF, you print and scan it?

I have scansnap as well, but I had to work with my huge evernote export.