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 llama.cpp and 4090.

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

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 VRAM headroom.

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

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.

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

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

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

Has anyone else run into this?

I'm mostly working with FLUX in MLX on 5090. The part I'm trying to understand is workstation thermals.

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?

Simple and boring is a valid answer.

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 MLX and B200.

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.

Maybe useful as a starting point: vLLM on M3 Max, keeping INT4 in mind from the start.

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

Curious what people here are seeing.

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

Would appreciate practical advice rather than theory.

This is mostly for local work rather than public serving.

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 prefill/decode split.

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

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 tokens/sec.

Would appreciate practical advice rather than theory.

This is mostly for local work rather than public serving.