Measured by boot probe on the shape-D base (production stopped, candidate
booted AS the service), plan numbers read off the engine's own log:
runtime overhead 7.60 -> 5.25 GiB (precise gfx1201 TP2 registry)
expert cache 14.87 -> 17.22 GiB
slots 6,496 -> 7,522 (+1,026, +16%)
swap region 13.7 GiB / 5,986 slots
boot healthy in 420 s, no OOM
'--expert-precise-memory': True also appears in non-default args, so a silent
argparse drop is visible. The pool is NOT cut (option A) because the pool is
not an arena lever: 3.15e9/rank keeps shape D's measured 1.99x concurrency,
and a 2.2e9 arm probed in the same window (277,686 tokens, 1.38x) is recorded
as the conservative fallback.
Boot-cost bug found while diffing Frank's 3xR9700 recipe: the image ships no
/root/.cache at all, our boot writes 1.1 GB of vLLM AOT/torch_compile
artifacts (4,665 files) plus 229 MB of comgr JIT kernels into the ephemeral
layer, and podman rm -f discards them — so every deploy/restart/reboot re-pays
'torch.compile took 181.20 s in total' (173.19 s of it one graph). Mounting
FRANK_PRIMARY_CACHE_DIR at /root/.cache persists both and hides nothing.
GPU_MAX_HW_QUEUES=2 added at Frank's direction (real HSA knob); not A/B
measured. Retracted my own recipe-diff claim that cudagraph_capture_sizes
needed pinning: capture is 3 PIECEWISE + 2 FULL graphs, 3 s, 0.31 GiB.
Tests: 367/367.