The obvious next lever for cache thrash was placement: send a new conversation
to the card carrying less context instead of alternating. Implemented it
(decayed prompt-token estimate per replica, continuations still pinned) and
A/B'd it against the counter on the workload it targets — one ~80k-token
family plus two ~50k-token families, each turn re-sending the same document:
counter heavy 13 turns median 25.4 s (23% cached)
medium 34.7 s / 45.2 s (14% / 15% cached)
balanced by load heavy 5 turns median 46.7 s (20% cached)
medium 23.4 s / 34.3 s (0% cached, small sample)
No improvement, so the change is reverted and routing.py keeps the counter.
The reason is arithmetic: a running request's live sequence and its cached
prefix draw on the same pool, so a card running two 50k-token generations has
already spent its 122,636 tokens before any cache entry is considered.
Placement chooses which card is over capacity, not whether one is.
Third hypothesis measured and rejected tonight (with SPEC depth kept and CHUNK
disproved); the runbook records all three so the next operator starts from
evidence rather than from these ideas looking obvious.
Server App Configs
The single repository for the two homelab servers: the Podman container stacks and the LLM inference fleet. One repo, one checkout per host, one deploy script.
2026-08-22: the former
vllmScriptsrepository (LLM fleet) is merged into this repo with its full git history. See AGENTS.md for the merge note.
Targets
| Host | User | IP | Podman stack | LLM service | LLM port |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| dankserver | dank | 192.168.0.235 | media and library | frank-medium (ROCmFPX llama.cpp, Qwen3.8-27B AGENT) | 7770 |
| dankclaw | dank | 192.168.0.143 | AI, search, development, observability | frank-large (CIRU ROCmFPX, Qwen3.8-27B) | 7770 |
Active Services
| Service | Host | Hostname | Port |
|---|---|---|---|
| RomM | dankserver | romm.dankserver.local | 8085 |
| Copyparty | dankserver | files.dankserver.local | 3923 |
| Calibre-Web | dankserver | books.dankserver.local | 8083 |
| frank-medium | dankserver | — (bare endpoint) | 7770 |
| SearXNG | dankclaw | search.dankclaw.local | 8081 |
| ComfyUI | dankclaw | comfyui.dankclaw.local | 8188 |
| OpenWebUI | dankclaw | chat.dankclaw.local | 3000 |
| Hermes | dankclaw | hermes.dankclaw.local | 8090 |
| Gitea | dankclaw | gitea.dankclaw.local | 3001 |
| Grafana | dankclaw | grafana.dankclaw.local | 3002 |
| Prometheus | dankclaw | prometheus.dankclaw.local | 9090 |
| frank-large | dankclaw | — (bare endpoint) | 7770 |
Structure
dankserver/— compose.yaml + Caddyfile + .env.example for the Dankserver stackdankclaw/— compose.yaml + Caddyfile + .env.example for the Dankclaw stackshared/— homepage, prometheus config, deploy helpersscripts/—deploy.shanddeploy-remote.sh(service-scoped deployment), the planner, LLM serve scripts, systemd units, env tunables, and bench harnessesold/— retired PP/NPU-era LLM scripts (reference only)serverAppConfigs-docs/— project knowledge base (Obsidian vault, wikilinks).serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/is the LLM fleettests/— bats test suite (see Testing Policy)
Deployment
See serverAppConfigs-docs/Architecture/Deployment Flow.md
and serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/deployment.md. Run
./scripts/deploy.sh <dankclaw|dankserver> after committing changes. It
plans and deploys only the changed services. Use --service NAME for an
explicit single-service retry; inference is restarted only when its own files
(or the shared chat template) changed.
Knowledge Base
The serverAppConfigs-docs/ directory is an Obsidian vault. Start at
serverAppConfigs-docs/index.md. The LLM fleet knowledge base lives at
serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/index.md.
Testing
Run ./tests/run.sh before every push. See
serverAppConfigs-docs/Architecture/Testing Policy.md.