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

One thing I keep noticing is that people underestimate long context until they actually try to run this stuff for more than one afternoon.

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

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

I tried this with Gemma using MLX on Threadripper box. The headline result was better than I expected, but structured output still ended up being the limiting factor.

Curious if anyone else landed in the same place.

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

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

One thing I keep noticing is that people underestimate tool calling until they actually try to run this stuff for more than one afternoon.

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

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

If I had to summarize the lesson so far, it would be that clean setup and observability beat clever guesses.

Wanted to compare notes with people doing similar things.

I'm mostly working with Gemma in LM Studio on 5090. The part I'm trying to understand is prefix caching.

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

This is mostly for local work rather than public serving.

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?

Would rather learn from your scars than collect my own all at once.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious.

My current setup is LM Studio with M3 Max, and I keep running into small local stacks.

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

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

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

Maybe useful as a starting point: llama.cpp on GB200, keeping small local stacks in mind from the start.

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

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

I'm helping a small team set up a local workflow. We don't need a giant stack, but we do care about reranking.

I'm especially interested in mistakes worth avoiding.

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

I expected the biggest difference to come from the model, but the stack around it mattered at least as much.

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

The more I work with local setups, the more it seems like structured output decides everything downstream.

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

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

I'm not trying to build a perfect architecture diagram. I just want a sane starting point around LM Studio and GB200.

Simple and boring is a valid answer.