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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 router policy.
Not looking for the perfect answer, mostly what worked in real use.
My use case is pretty ordinary: local chat, some document work, and occasional batch jobs.
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I'd approach it in a boring order. If you're on LM Studio, I'd confirm the version first and then reduce variables until the behavior is obvious. Not glamorous advice, but repeatable baselines save a lot of time.
small models can still be useful
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Good point. I don't think your conclusion is far off.
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I tested this tonight. My result was mixed: first run looked bad, second run looked normal. The main thing that moved was latency, not quality.
I'm happy to test one more variant if you want a second data point.
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What worked for me was pretty simple. Before rebuilding anything, I'd test one clean baseline with Mistral and compare from there. Not glamorous advice, but repeatable baselines save a lot of time.
small models can still be useful
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Ran a quick check on my box. On A6000 with MLX, I saw basically the same behavior. The surprise was that memory pressure showed up before throughput collapsed.
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I tested this tonight. The issue went away once I changed one setting and restarted the stack cleanly. The surprise was that memory pressure showed up before throughput collapsed.
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A couple things I'd check first. Start by verifying the driver/runtime combo, then test with a smaller prompt, then look at VRAM headroom.
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I'd approach it in a boring order. On M3 Max, the easiest win is often to back off the aggressive settings and see whether the problem survives. A lot of these threads end up being one bad config plus a pile of conclusions drawn from it.
small models can still be useful
