Frank
8a79f9a709
Neither lever alone could give both features. At reserve 24 the device budget
is 29.5 GiB and max_tok 32768's 37.0 GiB need always lost the doubling to the
fit-check clamp; at max_tok 16384 the doubling survived but prefill paid 8-9%.
Dropping the reserve to 15 moves the budget to 38.5:
121.2 host - 67.7 resident weights - 15 reserve = 38.5
need = 14.4 pool + 20.6 arena + 1.97 vision = 37.0 -> 1.5 GiB spare
So the payment is page cache for the n-gram lookup table rather than either
feature. 15 GiB, against a table of 47.7 GiB read through the file cache.
Two reasons this is a survivable risk rather than a cliff:
- The engine's own ledger reported only 12-17 GiB left at the previous 24
setting, so the declared reserve was never held literally; 15 may cost
less real cache than it reads as.
- The failure mode is legible: long prompts fault heavily against a busy
disk, and raising the reserve is the documented remedy. Not the silent
clamp, and not the 65536 no-boot mode.
1.5 GiB of headroom is thin and deliberate. Documented in the unit as a
matched pair with the pool: raise the reserve back to 24 and the doubling
quietly goes away again.
169 lines
9.2 KiB
INI
169 lines
9.2 KiB
INI
# Quadlet unit: frank-large (rootless, boot-persistent).
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#
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# Install path on dankclaw: ~/.config/containers/systemd/frank-large.container
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# Unit name: frank-large.service (container name: frank-large)
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#
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# The large inference service, since 2026-09-11 the halogen-flash-server
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# runtime serving peonist-ai/halogen-qwen3.8-flash-next (Qwen3.8-Flash-Next,
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# w4b .hgn checkpoint + quality overlay sidecar). It replaced the llama.cpp /
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# kingjones30-ROCmFPX STRIX deployment because the engine is ~4x faster on
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# prefill (the dominant cost of any real prompt) on this exact SKU.
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#
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# SHAPE. The image runs both halves in one container: the engine on container
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# loopback (:8730, UNAUTHENTICATED — never publish it) and the OpenAI
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# front-end on :8731, published here as host 7770 so the fleet's clients,
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# services.json probe and docs keep the port they have always used. Same for
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# HALOGEN_MODEL_ID=frank-large: it is the id at /v1/models, in /health and in
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# every response, so no client had to be renamed. Halogen never rejects a
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# request for naming a different model, it just serves it.
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#
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# DEVICES. gfx1151 through the amdgpu/KFD stack: /dev/kfd plus the DRM render
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# node. Both are 0666 on this host, so the rootless user namespace can open
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# them (id dank is also in render/video). seccomp=unconfined and --ipc=host are
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# the image's documented requirements; memlock must be unlimited.
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#
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# DO NOT name an environment variable TEMP, HOST or GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE: the HIP
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# runtime reads bare TEMP for its JIT cache path (2026-08-13 incident).
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#
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# MEMORY. Weights are pinned (HALOGEN_FLASH_PIN_TRUNK default 1) — that is the
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# configuration the published decode numbers were measured with, and `free`,
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# MemAvailable and every monitor built on them will overstate free memory by
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# the size of the model (~68 GiB) because the kernel counts the locked weights
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# as reclaimable page cache. Halogen prints the corrected figure at startup.
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# The pinned trunk means this container holds most of the host; a co-tenant
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# that then takes the remainder can stall both for minutes at full CPU with no
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# disk activity and no output. That is documented behaviour, not a crash, and
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# the escape hatch is HALOGEN_FLASH_PIN_TRUNK=0 (at several times the decode
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# cost). Sizing is chosen for a SHARED 121 GiB host, and HALOGEN_KV_POOL_FIT
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# stays on as the safety net: if the machine refuses the configured pool the
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# engine lowers it itself and prints what it settled on. Read that ledger on
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# every restart — it is the ground truth for sizing, not this comment.
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#
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# DOUBLED 2026-09-12: pool 524,288 positions (~14.4 GiB of KV at the
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# measured 28 KiB/position). This did NOT fit on the first attempt. The
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# engine's own ledger for the prior 262,144 config was 68.0 weights + 7.2
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# pool + 21.1 working = 96.3 GiB held, 12.1 GiB left on the host, and its
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# pre-flight arithmetic is: 121 GiB - 67.7 resident weights - 24.0 reserve
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# = 29.5 GiB of device budget, which has to cover the pool AND the prefill
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# arena together. 524,288 with the 32,768-token arena needs 35.0 GiB, so
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# HALOGEN_KV_POOL_FIT lowered the pool straight back to 262,144 and the
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# deploy still reported healthy. The doubling only becomes real together
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# with HALOGEN_MAX_TOK=16384 further down, which halves the arena and brings
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# the need to ~24.9 GiB. Read the `kv pool:` lines after every restart —
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# a green health check does NOT mean the pool you asked for is the pool you got.
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#
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# WEIGHTS. HALOGEN_DOWNLOAD fetches the whole weights repo on FIRST START ONLY
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# (the entrypoint checks whether the checkpoint is absent) into the bind mount
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# below, which must therefore be read-WRITE. huggingface_hub resumes partial
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# files natively, and the quadlet runs the container with --replace --rm, so a
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# restart mid-fetch continues rather than starting over. Roughly 127 GB: the
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# 115.55 GiB checkpoint, the 2.31 GiB quality overlay, the 0.84 GiB vision
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# tower and the tokenizer. The repo is public and ungated, so no token is
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# needed; later starts open no outbound connections at all.
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#
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# VISION. HALOGEN_VISION_TOWER=1 finds the sidecar beside the checkpoint. This
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# is the fleet's only image input since the FLM NPU endpoint was retired on
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# 2026-09-11; audio input has no replacement.
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#
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# CLIENT CONTRACT (see serverAppConfigs-docs/LLM/halogen-flash-server.md).
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# There are no server-side sampler defaults: a request that sends no
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# temperature decodes GREEDY. The per-request budget defaults to 8,192 tokens
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# and REASONING COUNTS AGAINST IT, so a budget that runs out mid-thought
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# returns finish_reason "length" with empty content and the partial reasoning
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# in reasoning_content. The cap is 65,536; above it a request is a 400, never a
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# silent truncation.
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#
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# IMAGE. The unit runs the localhost/-aliased tag: this host's podman quadlet
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# path cannot resolve registry-prefixed refs from local storage at create
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# time. deploy-remote.sh pulls the ghcr.io ref and re-tags it before the
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# restart. Pull=never keeps boots off the registry.
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[Unit]
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Description=frank-large — halogen-flash-server, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next (w4b) on gfx1151
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After=network-online.target
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[Container]
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ContainerName=frank-large
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Image=localhost/peonist-ai/halogen-flash-server:0.5.8
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# Published port stays 7770: Hermes, open-webui, the harness and the homepage
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# probe all point here. 8730 (the engine) is deliberately not published.
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PublishPort=7770:8731
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AddDevice=/dev/kfd
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AddDevice=/dev/dri
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# Read-write: the first start downloads into it. Contains only weights.
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Volume=/home/dank/models/halogen:/models
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# Fetch the weights on first start only (absent checkpoint gates it).
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Environment=HALOGEN_DOWNLOAD=peonist-ai/halogen-qwen3.8-flash-next
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# Fleet identity: the id at /v1/models, /health and every response body.
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Environment=HALOGEN_MODEL_ID=frank-large
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# Native context of the model. Matches what both clients declare.
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Environment=HALOGEN_CTX=262144
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# Doubled 2026-09-12 from the 262144 this had run since 09-11: two full-length
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# conversations resident at once, or four at 131k, instead of one.
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Environment=HALOGEN_KV_POOL_POSITIONS=524288
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Environment=HALOGEN_KV_SLOTS=4
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# Making the doubling stick is budget arithmetic, all of it. ONE budget covers
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# the KV pool, the prefill arena and the vision tower together:
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#
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# budget = 121.2 host - 67.7 resident weights - reserve
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# need = KV (~28 KiB/position) + arena + vision (1.97 measured)
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# arena = 3.80 GiB + 8.40 GiB x (HALOGEN_MAX_TOK / 16384)
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#
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# The arena term is linear in max_tok, and it reproduces five live restarts
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# AND upstream's three published "on the device" figures to within 0.1 GiB —
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# note those published figures are pool+arena totals, not pool alone, which is
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# the misreading that first made a doubling look affordable here. Every corner
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# this box offered at a reserve of 24:
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#
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# 16384 -> need 28.6 vs 29.5 FITS, 0.9 spare (doubling, 8-9% prefill cost)
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# 32768 -> need 37.0 vs 29.5 POOL CLAMPED to 262144, deploy still green
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# 65536 -> need 46.5 vs 29.5 OOM, will not boot; unit still reads ACTIVE
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#
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# None of those three gave both features. Dropping the reserve to 15 moves the
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# budget to 38.5, so 32768's need of 37.0 fits with 1.5 spare: full prefill
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# AND the doubled pool, paid for out of the n-gram page cache instead of out of
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# either feature. THE TWO SETTINGS ARE A MATCHED PAIR, NOT independent tunables
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# — raise the reserve back to 24 and the pool silently clamps to 262144 again.
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Environment=HALOGEN_MAX_TOK=32768
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# RAM left for the n-gram table the engine reads through the page cache.
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# LOWERED 2026-09-12 from 24 (vendor default is 20) to 15 to buy the doubled
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# pool at full prefill speed:
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# 121.2 host - 67.7 weights - 15 reserve = 38.5 budget
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# need = 14.4 pool + 20.6 arena + 1.97 vision = 37.0 -> 1.5 GiB headroom
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# Thin on purpose; do not go below 15 without re-doing that arithmetic. The
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# failure mode here is legible rather than fatal — long prompts fault heavily
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# against a busy disk, and the remedy is to raise this number until the pool
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# hands the memory back. Note the reserve was never held literally: at the
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# previous 24 setting the engine's own ledger reported only 12-17 GiB left.
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Environment=HALOGEN_HOST_RESERVE_GIB=15
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# Image input (the sidecar ships inside the weights repo).
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Environment=HALOGEN_VISION_TOWER=1
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# Verbose engine logging: the vendor's first-line evidence for load,
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# allocation and admission questions. Shipping it on means an incident report
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# already has the full startup account instead of needing a restart-into-debug.
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# HALOGEN_DMALLOC_LOG is deliberately NOT set — it logs every allocation
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# over 64 MB, which is steady-state noise here; raise it only for a live
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# OOM hunt.
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Environment=HALOGEN_VERBOSE=1
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# Required by the image: the engine maps the checkpoint and registers it with
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# the GPU in place, which needs host IPC and an unconfined seccomp profile.
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PodmanArgs=--ipc=host --security-opt seccomp=unconfined
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Ulimit=memlock=-1:-1
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# The image ships its own HEALTHCHECK; this pins it. /health asks the ENGINE
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# for a PONG before answering, so 200 means "ready to serve", not "process
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# alive". During the first-start download it stays unhealthy by design.
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HealthCmd=halogen-healthcheck api
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HealthInterval=30s
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HealthTimeout=10s
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HealthRetries=3
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HealthStartPeriod=300s
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Pull=never
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[Service]
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# The first start reads ~68 GiB off disk and pins it before serving.
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TimeoutStartSec=900
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Restart=on-failure
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RestartSec=10
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[Install]
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WantedBy=default.target
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