_check_ollama_starved and _arbitrate were solving the same problem, one of them
hardcoded to two applications. The Ollama-specific version is gone and the watchdog
calls only the generic loop. The OOM retry inside switch_ollama_model no longer
purges ComfyUI by name either: it asks plan_release which tenant should give up
memory, so a third application can be the one that yields, and when the reclaim is
not enough the response names the blockers instead of implying ComfyUI was at fault.
The dashboard showed exactly two engines, which no longer matched what the service
does. A GPU Tenants panel lists every configured application ordered by priority --
VRAM held, whether it is working, whether it can be reclaimed at all, and how much it
needs -- along with the last arbitration decision and why it could or could not be
satisfied.
That panel did not appear at first, and the reason is worth fixing rather than
working around: the browser kept serving a cached app.js despite the ETag, so a
reload ran the old dashboard against the new API. Assets are now stamped with their
mtime, so a changed file is always a different URL. Anyone updating this service would
have hit the same thing.
Also verified along the way that an apparent horizontal-overflow regression was a
measurement artifact from a zero-width browser pane, not a real layout fault.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Completes the generalisation. Classification and release were already data; the
decision loop was still two hardcoded rules -- yield Ollama when ComfyUI is busy,
purge ComfyUI when Ollama is starved -- which could not express a third participant.
plan_release() works from the registry instead. A busy tenant that cannot reach its
declared needs_vram_gb is starved, and the memory comes from idle reclaimable tenants
below it in priority, lowest first, stopping once enough is freed. Tenants that cannot
be released are named as blockers rather than passed over, so an impossible plan says
which process is in the way. The plan is returned before being acted on, so the
decision is testable and is logged before anything is released. Idle release is now
per-tenant too, replacing the ComfyUI-specific purge timer.
Two bugs found by running it against the live machine rather than only in tests:
Starvation was measured against free VRAM alone, so a tenant working perfectly well on
13 GB was flagged as demanding simply because little was left over -- which is the
normal state of a busy GPU, and would have caused pointless releases from everything
else. A tenant is starved only if it cannot reach what it needs counting what it
already holds.
Fields added to the tenant schema were silently absent from the config already written
to disk, so needs_vram_gb defaulted to 0 and starvation could never trigger for the two
tenants that mattered. Shipped defaults are now merged into an existing config on load,
with explicit user values still winning.
Tests: 242 (was 231), including a three-application contention case -- the property the
hardcoded pair of rules could not express.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The point of this service is fast handoff of one GPU between applications. It grew up
around the two on this box, and their names ended up compiled into process matching,
VRAM attribution, busy detection and release calls alike -- about 385 references
across five modules. That made it a script for Ollama and ComfyUI rather than a GPU
arbitrator.
tenants.py describes an application as data: how to recognise its processes, how to
tell whether it is genuinely working, how to ask it for VRAM back, and how much it
matters when two want the card. Ollama, ComfyUI and the desktop compositor ship as
defaults in tenants.json, so behaviour is unchanged, but the arbitration logic no
longer knows any particular name. Endpoints are generic: GET /api/tenants,
GET /api/tenants/{name}, POST /api/tenants/{name}/release -- the last being the
general form of both the Ollama soft-yield and the ComfyUI purge.
Verified by registering a third application on this machine with no code change: the
speech relay that had been showing up only as anonymous "unmanaged VRAM" is now named,
attributed, and probed by the VRAM it holds rather than by an API it does not have.
Because it declares no release strategy, a release request returns 409 explaining that
its memory cannot be reclaimed, instead of reporting a success that did nothing.
Busy probes deliberately cannot use GPU utilisation. It is shared by every tenant, so
it cannot attribute work to one of them -- the mistake that made a stale ComfyUI queue
entry undetectable earlier in this branch. A tenant's own VRAM is the signal.
Writing the tests exposed that the suite had become non-hermetic: classification is now
configuration, so a test asserting "a third-party process is unmanaged" started failing
the moment the speech relay was registered on this machine. An autouse fixture now
isolates every test from the operator's live tenants.json.
Tests: 231 (was 206).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Chasing why the reverse-direction reclaim never fired turned up something worse than
the reclaim itself.
The starvation check was never running. Instrumenting the watchdog showed busy=6,
idle_check=0: every poll took the "ComfyUI is busy" branch. ComfyUI's /queue was
reporting a WAN 2.1 i2v job in queue_running while the GPU sat at 0% and ComfyUI held
0.56 GB. The job was dead; ComfyUI had simply never cleared the row.
Believing that flag meant this service thought ComfyUI was permanently busy, so it
yielded the LLM's VRAM on every poll, never ran the idle purge, and never checked
whether the LLM had been squeezed onto the CPU. One stale row disabled half of the
arbitration, and it very likely explains the earlier burst of yields against a
cron-driven model.
A running entry is now corroborated before it is believed. The first attempt used GPU
utilisation, which does not work: utilisation is shared with Ollama and with the
third-party process on this box, so peak utilisation stayed above any sensible
threshold and a stuck entry never looked stale. ComfyUI's own VRAM is the right
signal -- a real diffusion job loads gigabytes of checkpoint, a dead one holds only
its CUDA context. After the fix the same watchdog reports busy=3, idle_check=32.
Every early return in the starvation check now records why it bailed, because with
four of them there was no way to tell which had fired. /api/health reports a stale
queue entry with its impact and how to clear it.
Also confirmed, contradicting an earlier conclusion in this branch: Ollama on this box
*does* spill to the CPU. smtek/Qwen3.8-27B:Q2_K_XL held steady at 29.2% on GPU
(size=15.59 GB, size_vram=4.56 GB) across twelve seconds of polling -- a stable
placement, not a progressive load. Both failure modes are real; which one occurs
depends on the model.
Tests: 206 (was 199).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The unit suite covers logic in isolation, but the promise this service exists to make
-- an LLM and a diffusion pipeline sharing one 16 GB card without either failing --
had only ever been checked by hand, piecemeal. verify_arbitration.py walks the whole
cycle against real hardware and reports what happened at each stage: load and its
bandwidth classification, the confirmed yield, a real SDXL graph, the deferred idle
purge, reclaim-and-retry, and finally whether VRAM attribution adds up and the
reported GPU state still matches the card. It restores what it changes and refuses
to start if ComfyUI is busy. Kept out of pytest deliberately: it moves real VRAM and
takes minutes.
Running it immediately found two bugs.
/api/switch-model reported every upstream failure as 500. Asking an embedding model
to generate makes Ollama return 400 -- the request is unusable, the service is fine
-- and calling that an Internal Server Error blames this service for the caller's
mistake. Failures now map to 400 for an upstream client error, 507 for a model that
will not fit (valid request, healthy service, no room), and 502 when Ollama itself
errors.
The verifier also picked the smallest installed model, which here is
nomic-embed-text -- an embedding model with no generate endpoint. It now filters
those out by family and name.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The stale-readback bug fixed in f5917a0 was a class, not an instance. Two more:
- ram_optimizer's residency report cached for 15s and was never invalidated when
anything warmed a file, so warming a model and then looking at residency showed
the state from before the warm. warm_file_to_ram now invalidates it.
- _PID_KIND_CACHE was keyed on pid alone and never expired. Linux recycles PIDs, so
a stale entry could attribute a new process's VRAM to Ollama or ComfyUI -- inside
the very snapshot the yield barrier trusts to decide whether VRAM was released.
Now keyed by (pid, process start time) and bounded.
Unmanaged VRAM. Investigating a persistence-mode warning turned up a third GPU
consumer this service does not model: stt_relay.py, holding 842 MB for nearly three
days. It was bucketed as "system" alongside gnome-shell's 3.9 MB. That conflation
matters, because ComfyUI's memory can be reclaimed and a third party's cannot, and
the reclaim path assumed ComfyUI was always to blame for missing headroom.
Processes are now bucketed ollama | comfy | desktop | unmanaged. The breakdown
reports desktop_gb and unmanaged_gb separately and names the unmanaged processes;
when a reclaim-and-retry still fails, the error identifies them rather than
implying ComfyUI was at fault; and the dashboard shows the unreclaimable total, so
headroom the arbitrator can never give back is visible rather than inferred.
Checked and deliberately not changed: persistence mode reads Disabled, but
nvidia-persistenced is active and two clients hold the GPU open continuously, so
the driver never unloads. The nvidia-smi warning is legacy noise here and is not a
source of the profile drift.
Tests: 169 (was 164). The new ones cover the bucketing, and one existing test used
Xorg as its "unknown process" fixture -- correct before a display server had its own
bucket, wrong after.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Tests. First automated coverage for the project: 164 tests, 2.7s, no GPU or network.
An autouse fixture stubs overclock_manager._sh -- the single choke point for every
nvidia-smi/nvidia-settings write -- so no test can mutate the card. They deliberately
pin the empirically measured constants that would otherwise rot silently: the cold and
warm load figures behind the cache-hit thresholds, the warm_confident residency rule,
and the busy/stalled yield split. One test asserts RAM_HIT_GBPS stays at or below the
measured 2.63 GB/s warm load, so the old physically unreachable 5.0 GB/s bar cannot
come back.
Three bugs the suite surfaced, now fixed:
- autotune._subsample(values, 1) divided by zero; the early return only covered
len(values) <= max_steps.
- telemetry_store.stop() flushed its local pending list but never drained the queue,
silently losing rows submitted just before a shutdown -- exactly when the last
events matter.
- ram_optimizer.page_residency's zero-byte short-circuit omitted keys every other
return path provides, so a 0-byte file was planned for warming.
Reclaim. The README has claimed bidirectional arbitration from the start, but only one
direction was ever automatic. Establishing what actually happens took a controlled test
with the service stopped: with ComfyUI holding 6.83 GB, Ollama does not spill to the CPU
on this box -- it aborts with "cudaMalloc failed: out of memory", because n_gpu_layers is
pinned to 99 and it will not reduce the layer count. So both failure modes are handled:
_check_ollama_starved watches size_vram < size for the default configuration where Ollama
does spill, and switch_ollama_model catches the hard OOM, reclaims VRAM from an idle
ComfyUI and retries once. The request that returned HTTP 500 from Ollama directly now
succeeds through HyperSwap, loading at 3.85 GB/s after reclaiming 6.83 GB.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The persisted counters showed 19 timeouts in 20 yields. All 19 were one model,
ornith-1.5:9b-cron, in two bursts at 06:25 and 06:33. Telemetry for that window
shows the GPU pinned at 96-97% with Ollama holding 14.92 GB throughout: the model
was mid-generation. Ollama will not unload a model that is inferencing, so every
request failed, and with a 1s trigger debounce against a 10s blocking wait the
arbitrator simply asked again, four times per burst, blocking the loop for 40s.
Ollama's behaviour is correct. Ours was wrong in three ways.
Busy is now a distinct outcome. _await_vram_release returns "released", "busy" or
"stuck": VRAM that has not moved while the GPU is pinned means a generation is in
flight, which is not a failure. With OLLAMA_NUM_PARALLEL=1 our keep_alive:0 request
queues behind the running one and applies the moment it finishes, so the correct
response is to stop waiting, not to retry. Only "stuck" -- VRAM held with an idle
GPU -- is a real fault.
The wait is short again (2s, from 10s) because blocking helps nobody: ComfyUI is
not gated on our return value, and every blocked second stalls the watchdog and
profile switching. Callers who genuinely want to wait out an inference can pass
wait_for_generation=true. The unload POST itself now gets a 120s client timeout,
since a 5s one could drop the connection before Ollama ever processed a request
queued behind a long generation, losing the unload entirely.
A busy model gets per-model backoff (5s, 15s, 30s, 60s) instead of being asked
again every second, and a detached watcher confirms and logs the release when the
generation ends, so the event log tells the whole story rather than stopping at
"deferred". Measured: a mid-generation yield now returns busy in 610ms instead of
blocking 10s, and the queued unload lands on its own 3s later when the generation
completes.
Counters are honest: yields (released), yield_deferred_busy, deferred_releases,
yield_stalled. The old yield_timeouts conflated a healthy cron job with a fault
and implied a 95% failure rate.
Also adds a VRAM Arbitration panel to the dashboard. The arbitrator is the core of
this application and its state was not displayed anywhere -- there was no way to
see whether handoffs were working, which is why this went unnoticed until the
persisted counters were read by hand.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Calibration. The same 12.87GB model loaded through Ollama on this box:
3.1% resident (FADV_DONTNEED) -> 34.3s -> 0.38 GB/s
100% resident (force-warmed) -> 4.9s -> 2.63 GB/s
The thresholds had been guessed from PCIe bus bandwidth: cache hit at >=5 GB/s. A fully
warm load only reaches 2.63 GB/s, because load_duration covers host-to-device transfer
and model init as well as the file read -- the page cache itself reads at 6.4 GB/s. The
5 GB/s bar was therefore unreachable, and every warm load was being reported as a
partial hit. Now 2.0 / 0.8 GB/s, either side of the measured 6.9x separation.
Warm-skip was also unsafe. A 12.87GB blob was skipped as already resident on the
strength of twelve 2MB probe windows, then loaded at 2.44 GB/s. Skipping now requires
warm_confident: an exact cachestat reading, or a probe finding every one of 32 denser
samples resident. warm_file_to_ram/warm_ollama_blob take force=True, exposed on the
warm-model endpoint, whose Pydantic model was missing the field entirely.
MCP parity: the server had drifted well behind the REST API. Adds tools for measured
residency, warm planning, VRAM requests, per-profile analytics, thermal governor
control, overclock status/apply/restore, and autotune sweeps plus status -- 23 tools
and 6 resources, up from 12 and 3. The telemetry store now starts in __main__ rather
than at import scope, since server.py imports this module for the benchmark tool.
README: replaced the remaining theoretical claims (31.5 GB/s bus rate, sub-1.5s loads,
15ms yields) with the measured numbers.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The profiles were hand-written and had never been checked against the hardware. Adding
a ComfyUI benchmark alongside the existing decode one made the compute side measurable
for the first time, and most of what the profiles configured turned out to do nothing.
Measured on this card (RTX 4080 SUPER, driver 595.84):
- LLM decode is not power-bound: 73.0-73.5 tok/s flat from 222W to 370W, with the card
never drawing more than 224W at any limit. The ollama profile's 370W did nothing.
- Diffusion is power-bound: 5.48 it/s @222W rising to 6.71 @370W, so comfy's 370W is
worth a real +2.8% over the 320W stock default.
- Clock locks did nothing for either workload: 72.6 tok/s locked at 11251MHz vs 72.7
unlocked; 6.77 it/s locked at 3105MHz vs 6.73 unlocked, and 6.78 at 2400MHz.
- Memory bandwidth is still the decode bottleneck (5001MHz halves throughput to 35.9
tok/s), confirming the profile's premise -- the card just gets there unaided.
- Fans: 48,435 samples show 81C all-time max and zero thermal throttle events, while
the ollama profile held 49.6C average by running fans at 87%. All profiles now use
automatic fans and let the thermal governor escalate on demand.
Code changes supporting that:
- _diffusion_benchmark() queues a fixed SDXL graph via ComfyUI's API. The seed must
vary per run: ComfyUI caches by node inputs, so a fixed seed returned in ~1ms without
executing. Implausibly fast results are now rejected as cache hits rather than
recorded as record scores.
- The arbitrator's automatic profile switching is suspended during a sweep. A diffusion
benchmark trips trigger_comfy_priority, which reapplies the whole profile and would
silently overwrite the clock being measured.
- _supported_clocks() queries the mem,gr pair; asking for a single field returned one
column and reading index 1 yielded an empty list rather than an error. Graphics clocks
are subsampled (the card enumerates 194 of them) and lock sweeps include an explicit
unlocked control step.
- offsets_supported() probes once and apply_profile skips inert offset levers with an
explanation instead of pretending they applied.
- Profiles carry a 'measured' field recording the evidence behind each setting.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The confirm barrier surfaced two yields that left 8.2 GB allocated after 3s. Two
separate issues behind that class of failure:
- The yield only unloaded loaded_models[0]. Ollama can hold several models resident
(OLLAMA_MAX_LOADED_MODELS), so releasing the first left the rest allocated. It now
unloads every resident model concurrently. This box runs with the limit at 1, so
the change is defensive here rather than a fix for the observed case.
- The observed 8.2 GB stalls happened while ComfyUI was starting and Ollama had a
generation in flight; Ollama will not unload mid-request. A 3s ceiling reported a
timeout for a model that was simply busy finishing. Raised to 10s -- waiting longer
is the safer failure mode, since the alternative is diffusion allocating into VRAM
that is still occupied.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Nine changes, in rough order of how much they affect real behaviour:
1. VRAM yield is now a barrier. Posting keep_alive:0 only asks Ollama to unload;
measured here, the HTTP call returns in 63ms while the driver takes a further
77ms to release 14.9GB. Returning inside that window is how ComfyUI ends up
allocating into VRAM that is still occupied. instant_free_ollama_vram() polls
NVML until the allocation is actually gone and reports request/confirm split.
2. ComfyUI VRAM is no longer purged 1.5s after every prompt, which forced a full
checkpoint reload on each workflow iteration. It is held for 30s of genuinely
empty queue, with an immediate purge when Ollama actually asks for the memory.
3. Cache-hit classification uses achieved bandwidth (size / load duration) rather
than a fixed `load_duration < 2500ms`. That constant called a 12.9GB model read
at 2.9GB/s a cold load, and a 0.5GB model read from NVMe a cache hit.
4. Page-cache residency is measured, not assumed. mincore(2) reported 128GB
resident on a box with 46GB of page cache: the kernel only permits page-cache
introspection on files you own, and the Ollama blobs are owned by uid ollama,
for which mincore answers "all resident" instead of failing. Uses cachestat(2)
where permitted and a randomised read-rate probe elsewhere, labelling which was
used. Fixed-offset probing was self-fulfilling, so windows are random and cold
ones are returned with FADV_DONTNEED.
5. Warming is budgeted and ranked by recency/frequency instead of reading every
file top-to-bottom, which on 64GB of RAM just evicts whatever was warmed first.
6. Telemetry and events persist to SQLite (~0.38 MB/hour) instead of living in a
50-entry in-memory deque, so /api/analytics/profiles can finally answer whether
an overclock profile actually delivers more tok/s.
7. Thermal governor walks the overclock back on sustained heat or hardware
throttling, with hysteresis, fed from the existing sampler.
8. Autotune sweeps a clock offset, benchmarks decode at each step, watches for Xid
errors and degenerate output, and restores the profile in a finally block.
9. Stock clocks/power/fans are restored on shutdown and via systemd ExecStopPost.
Nothing previously undid a locked clock or a manually pinned fan.
Also: one shared 1Hz telemetry sampler fanned out to SSE subscribers rather than
every client re-running the whole snapshot; wall-clock timestamps in place of the
event loop's monotonic clock; cached nvidia-smi shell-outs; quieter httpx logging.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
