The Slow Reply Was CPU Time

Thirteen gigabytes of memory were still free, and the answer was still slow.

Savindu Thathsara, savithathsara.me. This is a Hearthlen note from the laptop.

Sinhala had just been added beside English, and a question took long enough to feel stuck. The check was /proc/meminfo: 13.0 GB available out of 15.5 GB. The listener was 1507 MB. The language model was not loaded until someone spoke. So this was not a machine that had run out of memory.

The time was the models doing work. The bilingual speech model spent 2407 ms on a short clip, because it also had to guess the language. A Sinhala reply from Qwen2.5-3B took 9564 ms. English is the only speech path again, on the smaller English model. After that restart the listener was 1331 MB, and 13.0 GB was still free. The 3B model is still what thinks, so a reply is still a few seconds. It is no longer also paying for a second language. The bilingual note is English and Sinhala.

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Savindu Thathsara builds practical AI and automation in London. This series is the public log of an offline AI operating system he is writing and learning at the same time.

• Site: https://savithathsara.me
• Email: [e-mail]
• DEV: https://dev.to/savinduthathsara