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.…