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.

Happy to post more details if anyone wants them.

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.

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

One thing I keep noticing is that people underestimate workstation thermals 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.

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

I've gone back and forth between SGLang and LM Studio for Mixtral. The interesting difference for me has been speculative decoding.

Trying to avoid rebuilding the whole thing twice.

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 SGLang and 5090 felt surprisingly usable once I tuned around workstation thermals.

Maybe useful as a starting point for newer folks.

This is mostly for local work rather than public serving.

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 MoE serving.

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

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

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

This isn't revolutionary, but the combination of Ollama and M3 Max felt surprisingly usable once I tuned around reranking.

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

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.

I'm not trying to build a perfect architecture diagram. I just want a sane starting point around MLX and M3 Max.

Simple and boring is a valid answer.

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

Has anyone else run into this?

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

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.

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

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

Trying to avoid rebuilding the whole thing twice.