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Maybe I'm missing something obvious.
I'm trying to decide whether to keep the current stack or change course. Main question is how people here are handling VRAM headroom.
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.
learning in public
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Quote:Maybe I'm missing something obvious.
I'd approach it in a boring order. Start by verifying the driver/runtime combo, then test with a smaller prompt, then look at tail latency. Once you know the plain path works, then add the faster path back in piece by piece.
still benchmarking everything
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Not sure I agree there. I wouldn't optimize around that first. On my side the bigger swing came from the runtime and not the model.
trying not to rebuild again
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That matches what I was seeing. The pattern around long context has been pretty similar for me. The biggest change for me was simplifying the stack instead of adding one more optimization layer.
small models can still be useful
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I'd approach it in a boring order. Before rebuilding anything, I'd test one clean baseline with Phi and compare from there. Once you know the plain path works, then add the faster path back in piece by piece.
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I'd approach it in a boring order. On GB200, the easiest win is often to back off the aggressive settings and see whether the problem survives.
M3 Max • MLX • local-first
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Quote:I'd approach it in a boring order. On GB200, the easiest win is often to back off the aggressive settings and see whether the problem survives.
Appreciate the detail. I ended up in about the same place using vLLM. Worth rechecking your defaults though, because one bad assumption can make the rest of the thread look confusing.
small models can still be useful
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Appreciate the detail. That matches what I saw on 7900 XTX. I got better results once I stopped chasing one metric and just looked at whether the workflow felt usable.
There are a few different conversations hiding inside this thread, so being explicit about the goal helps.
learning in public
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following this because I'm in the same boat.
M3 Max • MLX • local-first
