r/LocalLLaMA 1h ago

Discussion Slow interference is great

No seriously, I kinda like it.
You have something to solve, you put it.

You know its gonna take like 20 mins to cook.
Every search adds another 30 minutes.

Yes I could boot up my debian on my gaming rig, run the same model at 10t/s + but why?
I rather let the poor server without GPU burn and run the same model at 2t/s and chill.

Its great, I love it.

19 Upvotes

34 comments sorted by

42

u/Max-_-Power 1h ago

Whatever floats your boat, mate

3

u/sourceholder 1h ago

It's just hot air.... from the GPU blower.

28

u/Bulky-Priority6824 1h ago

20 mins to cook a task @ 2 tg/s ?

Bruh at 77 tg/s I'm hitting 23mins on average task. 

What are you cooking?

5

u/Saifl 1h ago

Dry aged steak. He looks at it while its aging and periodically goes back to add a new task and goes back to watching the steak dry age.

2

u/Ne00n 1h ago

I asked it to analyze my memory upgrade.
One response, consumed 27k tokens.
The output and summary was crazy though.

8

u/MetalDeep329 55m ago

Might as well just google it

3

u/Bulky-Priority6824 1h ago

Oh you mean you asked question ok

1

u/doctorfiend 16m ago

"What's the capital of Germany?"

14

u/Webster2026 1h ago

BTW- its called inference...

-1

u/Ne00n 1h ago

ups

4

u/ohrelia 1h ago

There's some truth to this. I used to have the GPT x5 plan but I would be constantly using it way too much. My life has improved again since going local. Now I just run Deepseek 0731 at 12-20tks, Qwen 3.8 flash at 12-25tks and GLM 5.3 flash at around 6-10tks. I prefer it immensely. Now I only have the cheap plan for 5.6 Sol and I use it whenever my local stuff is struggling.

Addiction is real!

3

u/bigattichouse 1h ago

Same.. bigger/slower model, and let it cook overnight on a task, get something interesting in the morning.

3

u/ProdoRock 1h ago

It gives you that punchcard feeling of 50s/60s computing. But now it’s early local ai on consumer hardware!

There is also this notion of optimizing. What else can I squeeze through this 2020 based M1?

3

u/XiRw 1h ago

I came from 0.5 tok/s so it holds a special spot for me also. As long as it gets the job done I don’t care .

8

u/Saifl 1h ago

Man we should have a shitpost tag. I get a good laugh sometimes reading these titles or some of the comments in other posts.

2

u/SeriousPanic34 1h ago

I like the relatively slow 27 t/s of my qwen3.8 27b because i can read the thinking it is doing - sometimes it's enough to steer me in the right direction or make me realize something that i can interrupt the llm and add immediately. With cloud models they think so fast that you only really get to read the final outputs, which may not contain the interesting bits the llm found along the way

2

u/BorpMyGurd 1h ago

Power efficiency is a pig. Electricity is too expensive for that shit. It's hard enough to justify the cost of local inference as it is without throwing power away.

1

u/ryfromoz 31m ago

Looks at solar array with battery. Power is nothing to me but id still not match OP enthusiasm for that kind speed.

2

u/t0mi74 1h ago

I thought I was the only one.

2

u/GregAbeI 1h ago

Big models better, always.

Things that need human checks should not move faster than humans can check.

1

u/TripleSecretSquirrel 1h ago

Increasingly, I agree with you!

Most of us here (myself included a lot of times), seem to gravitate toward trying to replicate the Claude/ChatGPT experience locally. Which is to say we’re looking for the smartest model and tinkering to get it to run as fast as we possibly can on enthusiast or consumer grade hardware. Optimization makes sense of course, but the reality is that unless I’m dropping $100k+ on hardware, I just cannot run a frontier model at cloud speeds. I could run it very slowly or I could run a smaller model much more quickly. Sometimes the right choice is the big slow model, sometimes it’s the small fast model.

I don’t think the goal needs to be to replicate the cloud API experience. I think the goal of squeezing more performance and intelligence out of our relatively limited hardware and models is really fucking cool, fun, and useful in and of itself. With the right harness, scoping, task definitions, plans, management, and loops, you can get incredible performance out of local models. I’m learning way more about how to effectively deploy models and agents this way! Plus it’s the best way to learn what models are capable of what tasks and when to invoke a larger slower model or (god forgive me) a cloud model.

1

u/SensitiveCranberry00 1h ago

That's what I do. I give it a project and come back later.

1

u/SomewhereAtWork 1h ago

Yes I could boot up my debian on my gaming rig, run the same model at 10t/s + but why?

Turn it into a Debian gaming rig. Then you can do both.

Gaming on Linux actually doesn't suck anymore.

1

u/alpacadaver 54m ago

Fast inference is like slow inference but faster.

1

u/ttkciar llama.cpp 5m ago

It's also frequently worse.

To get fast inference, I have to use a model and context which fits in VRAM.

Slow inference tasks can use a model and context several times larger, because it need only fit in system memory.

1

u/Mingay_cat 52m ago

I love my 0.7 tok/s qwen 27b and also vibe coding the shit out of colibri to just run models that barely fit on my disk at ridiculously low speeds to say I ran it locally.

1

u/AnnoyedAvocado21 45m ago

I have the ASUS DGX Spark clone so I have 128gb unified memory. Not shabby but not a speed demon that runs the biggest models either. I'm testing qwen38-27b-nvfp4 in the Deepseek harness and the Hermes harness and using ChatGPT to design the tests. I've explained to ChatGPT that I don't care about tokens, I don't care about token speed - I only care about the quality of the result. I'm giving it some coding tasks while I work on other projects. We're developing a personality profile and a communications profile. Qwen38 is very good at long tasks and tool use and uses vision as well while in the Deepseek harness. What I'm learning is there is a good way to prompt the model and a bad way and I'm generating a document I can use in the harness to ensure all request are formatted to get the best out of the model-harness pair.

Some talking head made the comment that the chat interface taught us wrong - it got us used to near immediate responses. Using agents is something where you prep, launch, and come back hours later - like baking a cake or cooking a Thanksgiving turkey.

Trust me - if I come into great wealth I'll upgrade my rig but until then I'll work to squeeze the best quality out of the rig I have.

1

u/No_Lingonberry1201 39m ago

Know what you mean, choom. A small feature takes 40 minutes, I might as well go and play some Factorio.

1

u/hobopwnzor 20m ago

Friction often makes systems better.  People want instant results but they will often get better results from slower work, because it makes them think.  If there's a job that will take 30 minutes they'll think before they submit.  If it takes 5s but costs the same they won't.

1

u/ea_man 15m ago

They say that limitations do stimulate creativity.

0

u/AnonymousCrayonEater 1h ago

Charge by the hour ass take

0

u/Constant-Simple-1234 1h ago

I got addicted to speed. Even at 130 I am merely satisfied. Can get a better quality at 60, but it makes me impatient.