Raising the prefill chunk to 16384 grows the arena enough that the KV cache falls to 4.22 GiB against the 5.21 GiB a 114688-token context needs, so the engine refuses to start. Measured single-card prefill at 8192 is ~2.5k tok/s (~15k-token prompt, 5992 ms TTFT); the trade would mean cutting context for unmeasured prefill gain, so the default stands.