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 tokens/sec decides everything downstream.

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.

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

I tried this with Qwen using LM Studio on B200. The headline result was better than I expected, but speculative decoding still ended up being the limiting factor.

Curious if anyone else landed in the same place.

This is mostly for local work rather than public serving.

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

I've gone back and forth between TensorRT-LLM and TensorRT-LLM for Llama. The interesting difference for me has been quant drift.

Interested in tradeoffs more than fan loyalty.

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 KV cache pressure.

Simple and boring is a valid answer.

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

I've gone back and forth between LM Studio and PyTorch for Kimi. The interesting difference for me has been small local stacks.

Interested in tradeoffs more than fan loyalty.

This is mostly for local work rather than public serving.

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

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

Trying to avoid rebuilding the whole thing twice.

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

Two paths both seem viable, but they break down differently once INT4 becomes important.

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

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

Short version: vLLM behaved well for me, but only after I stopped ignoring NVFP4.

Nothing scientific here, just practical notes from a real setup.

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?

I'm especially interested in mistakes worth avoiding.

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

One thing I keep noticing is that people underestimate quant drift 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.

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