V1.14, released yesterday [1], ships with a search embedding cache. Most of the time you see is spent waiting for an OpenAI embedding answer. We also just shipped composite embedders to reduce the network latency when you need to respond quickly to user searches (by running embedders on the Meilisearch server) but still use external APIs to index many documents in batches. Note that it can only work with open-source embedders, the ones HuggingFace serves.
[1]: https://github.com/meilisearch/meilisearch/releases/tag/v1.1...