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

I'm comparing two approaches here: keep it simple on M3 Max, or squeeze more out of the stack and deal with the complexity.

Interested in tradeoffs more than fan loyalty.

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

Two paths both seem viable, but they break down differently once VRAM headroom becomes important.

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

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

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: Phi, llama.cpp, Threadripper box, with a lot of attention on structured output.

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

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

The part that surprised me was how much the boring details mattered more than the model choice.

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: Llama, PyTorch, M3 Max, with a lot of attention on continuous batching.

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 consumer GPUs.

Wondering if this is just where the whole space is heading now.

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

I'm trying to sanity-check my setup.

I'm trying to decide whether to keep the current stack or change course. Main question is how people here are handling prefill/decode split.

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

Curious what people here are seeing.

I'm mostly working with Mistral in MLX on A6000. The part I'm trying to understand is router policy.

Would appreciate practical advice rather than theory.

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.

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

This isn't revolutionary, but the combination of SGLang and 4090 felt surprisingly usable once I tuned around tool calling.

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

I'm trying to sanity-check my setup.

My current setup is SGLang with B200, and I keep running into long context.

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.