Two more hypotheses, both measured on the same three-family workload (one ~80k-token family plus two ~50k-token families, each turn re-sending its document): 1. Long-prefix caching is fine. One card, idle engine, a ~50k-token prompt sent three times: 22.3 s cold, then 1.4 s, 1.4 s — with a varying tail too (22.4 / 1.41 / 1.41). So the engine's lifetime "Prefix cache hit rate: 29%" is an average across every prompt that replica ever saw, not a verdict on any one request, and the pinning policy is safe. 2. Serialising large requests does not fix the overload. Admission control (at most one >16k-token request per card, small requests untouched) gave no clear win on small samples — heavy 25.4 s -> 48.2 s median, mediums 34.7/45.2 s -> 22.7/22.6 s, cache-hit rates 14-33 % both ways — so it was reverted like the placement change before it. The arithmetic now closes: with three families on two cards, one card holds two families and must carry 2 x 50k of cached prefix plus the 50k of the sequence generating — 150k against 122,636 tokens. Those co-tenants evict each other regardless of concurrency limits. The wall is capacity, and the runbook says so with the numbers.
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.