I'm trying to sanity-check my setup.

My current setup is llama.cpp with 4090, and I keep running into workstation thermals.

Not looking for the perfect answer, mostly what worked in real use.

I figured I'd ask here before changing everything.

I'm trying to decide whether to keep the current stack or change course. Main question is how people here are handling long context.

Would appreciate practical advice rather than theory.

Spent some time on this today and wanted to compare notes.

Two paths both seem viable, but they break down differently once speculative decoding becomes important.

Trying to avoid rebuilding the whole thing twice.

My use case is pretty ordinary: local chat, some document work, and occasional batch jobs.

Thought I'd post a small recipe because a lot of threads ask similar things.

Maybe useful as a starting point: llama.cpp on M3 Max, keeping long context in mind from the start.

Feel free to tear it apart if you see something dumb.

Thought I'd post a small recipe because a lot of threads ask similar things.

This isn't revolutionary, but the combination of llama.cpp and 7900 XTX felt surprisingly usable once I tuned around token cost.

Maybe useful as a starting point for newer folks.

This keeps coming up in conversation so I figured I'd start a thread.

It feels like the conversation has shifted hard toward inference and serving details lately, and honestly that makes sense once you start dealing with workstation thermals.

Curious whether that lines up with what other people are seeing.

For context, I'm not chasing leaderboard numbers. I mostly want the system to feel consistent day to day.

This keeps coming up in conversation so I figured I'd start a thread.

It feels like the conversation has shifted hard toward inference and serving details lately, and honestly that makes sense once you start dealing with INT4.

Curious whether that lines up with what other people are seeing.

This keeps coming up in conversation so I figured I'd start a thread.

It feels like the conversation has shifted hard toward inference and serving details lately, and honestly that makes sense once you start dealing with KV cache pressure.

Maybe obvious to some of you, but it clicked for me this week.

Did a bit of testing and thought I'd post the result here.

Short version: SGLang behaved well for me, but only after I stopped ignoring tool calling.

Happy to post more details if anyone wants them.

Spent some time on this today and wanted to compare notes.

Two paths both seem viable, but they break down differently once quant drift becomes important.

What would you pick if you had to live with it for a few months?

My use case is pretty ordinary: local chat, some document work, and occasional batch jobs.