nexa/docs/12-optimization-opportunities.md

12 — Optimization Opportunities

Observations from the running infrastructure. Each item is independent — accept, defer, or reject.

For Nexa directly

1. Reuse, don't redeploy. The earlier DEPLOYMENT.md would have spun a second Memos / n8n / Qdrant. The current homelab already runs all three. The new 09-deployment treats these as pre-existing — keeps the config minimal and avoids port collisions.
2. Use LiteLLM virtual keys per logical caller. Today there's one SAIA key. Issuing one key per workflow (nexa-router, nexa-embed, nexa-digest) lets you set different per-key rate/cost limits and disable a single workflow without rotating everything.
3. Use n8n's credential objects, never inline secrets. The current workflows under nexa-core/n8n-workflows/phase-1/*.json should be reviewed — if any header Authorization is hardcoded, replace with credential references before importing.
4. Centralise system alerts on a single ntfy topic (nexa.system). Backrest, Proxmox notifications, n8n failure-webhook and the Octoprint Exited state all go to that topic; one Memos system memo aggregates them.
5. Defer graph DB until Phase 3.4. Qdrant alone covers ~80% of the assistant's daily value. The graph DB is justified once you actually need dependency analysis or critical-path queries.
6. Auto-export n8n workflows. nexa-core/scripts/backup_workflows.sh already exists. Schedule it inside the n8n container (cron) and let it git commit && git push — this is the cheapest disaster recovery.

For the wider homelab (out of scope but worth noting)

7. Octoprint EXITED — either remove the Homepage entry or fix the container; right now it permanently shows red.
8. Zoraxy widget missing on Homepage. Homepage v1.x has no built-in Zoraxy widget, but you can use the generic customapi widget against /api/stats/summary to surface request counts.
9. AI gateway naming. ai.nuclide.systems currently proxies LobeHub (a chat UI on :3210), while the LiteLLM API lives on :4000. For Nexa, point n8n directly at LiteLLM (http://192.168.1.40:4000 over the docker net — no public TLS hop needed) to save latency and isolate from UI restarts.
10. MCP servers consolidation. Dozzle shows crawl4ai-mcp, markitdown-mcp, papersearch-mcp running individually. They're all MCP servers — Nexa Phase-3 could pull from these via LiteLLM's MCP support to enrich the embedding pipeline (e.g. fetch + markitdown a Karakeep link before embedding).
11. Backup the n8n SQLite file — Backrest covers /home/node/.n8n if added; today the only "backup" is the workflow JSON which omits credentials and execution history.
12. Pocket-ID SSO in front of n8n would let you remove n8n basic-auth and unify session management across the whole stack. One-time setup, large UX win.
13. Vaultwarden as the secret store for Nexa secrets (SAIA_API_KEY, MEMOS_API_KEY, …) — read at bootstrap via the Bitwarden CLI from inside the docker host. Removes the need for a .env on disk.
14. AdGuard as DNS-based control plane. Since AdGuard is the resolver for the LAN, you can rewrite *.nuclide.systems to 192.168.1.4 (Zoraxy) internally and avoid a hairpin via the WAN — already the case if AdGuard rewrite rules are set, worth verifying.
15. Immich + Qdrant. Immich is already running and embeds photos with CLIP. If you ever want photo-aware Nexa answers, you can mount Immich's existing search via its API — no second embedding pass.
16. Disk usage on LXC 104 is 47.7 % (Proxmox). Monitor; n8n execution logs and Dozzle history are the usual culprits. Setting EXECUTIONS_DATA_PRUNE=true and EXECUTIONS_DATA_MAX_AGE=168 (7 days) on n8n keeps it bounded.