Wanted to compare notes with people doing similar things.

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

If you've tested something similar, what did you keep and what did you stop bothering with?

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

Posting this in case it saves someone else a little time.

If you were starting from scratch today for this use case, what would you choose first and what would you ignore?

Simple and boring is a valid answer.

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

I'm comparing two approaches here: keep it simple on 7900 XTX, or squeeze more out of the stack and deal with the complexity.

Interested in tradeoffs more than fan loyalty.

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

Maybe useful as a starting point: llama.cpp on Threadripper box, keeping MoE serving in mind from the start.

If someone wants the exact settings I can clean them up and post them.

I care more about stability than squeezing the last possible tokens/sec out of it.

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

This isn't revolutionary, but the combination of MLX and A6000 felt surprisingly usable once I tuned around embeddings.

Maybe useful as a starting point for newer folks.

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

I've gone back and forth between PyTorch and vLLM for DeepSeek. The interesting difference for me has been VRAM headroom.

Interested in tradeoffs more than fan loyalty.

I care more about stability than squeezing the last possible tokens/sec out of it.

Curious what people here are seeing.

I'm mostly working with DeepSeek in vLLM on M3 Max. The part I'm trying to understand is speculative decoding.

If you've tested something similar, what did you keep and what did you stop bothering with?

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

Just sharing a setup that ended up working reasonably well: Kimi, vLLM, 7900 XTX, with a lot of attention on batch size.

Maybe useful as a starting point for newer folks. Turns out 'just one more test' was a lie.

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 small local stacks.

Would appreciate practical advice rather than theory.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious.

My current setup is SGLang with 5090, and I keep running into reranking.

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