Restoring the two GPU0 seats with `start meromero; sleep 10; start gen` put
meromero into a 7-restart crash-loop:
ValueError: Free memory on device cuda:0 (35.3/94.97 GiB) on startup is less
than desired GPU memory utilization (0.52, 49.38 GiB).
The previous commit's README claimed restore order "is not actually load-bearing"
on the grounds that both seats pass --gpu-memory-utilization as a fraction of
total VRAM. That is half right and the wrong half mattered: the fraction sets the
target, but vLLM gates startup on FREE VRAM and refuses to start unless the whole
target is available. GPU0 runs at ~96.4/97.9 GB with roughly 0.4 GiB of slack, so
the seats coexist only in the order they were originally brought up, and meromero
is the one that does not fit in the remainder. The pre-existing auto-memory note
("gen takes a fraction of free VRAM at startup and will starve meromero") was
pointing at the real effect.
Also: "first" means healthy, not ten seconds earlier. A sleep 10 against a
two-to-three minute weight load is simultaneity, not ordering — gate on observed
state.
Recovery applied: stop gen, wait for meromero healthy, start gen. Verified
against the pre-window baseline rather than against "both green":
gen KV 14.36 GiB / 403,065 tok / 1.54x -> 14.34 GiB / 401,550 tok / 1.53x
meromero KV 542,202 tok -> 542,202 tok
RestartCount 0 on both; summarizer smoke-tested through LiteLLM
Note for the next reader: raw nvidia-smi used-MiB is the wrong check here. It
reads 89,503 now vs 96,376 before, which looks like a 6.9 GB regression and is
allocator slack — serving capacity is unchanged. The anomalous boots were the
high ones (34.95 GiB KV), where gen came up on an empty card mid-window.
vh
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