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Ollama's token speed metrics are misleading due to cache inflation

By PulseAugur Editorial · [1 sources] ·

A recent blog post highlights a significant discrepancy in how Ollama reports model performance, specifically regarding token generation speed. The author demonstrates that Ollama's default metrics can be misleading, inflating the reported tokens/sec by including cached tokens in the calculation. This leads to an inaccurate representation of actual model throughput, especially in conversational contexts where prompt elements are reused. The post suggests a corrected calculation that accounts for uncached tokens to provide a more truthful measure of performance. AI

IMPACT Accurate performance metrics are crucial for developers choosing and optimizing local LLM deployments.

RANK_REASON The item discusses a specific technical detail and potential bug in a software tool (Ollama) related to performance metric calculation.

Read on dev.to — LLM tag →

AI-generated summary · Google Gemini · from 1 sources. How we write summaries →

Ollama's token speed metrics are misleading due to cache inflation

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12 / 100
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Tool
The item discusses a specific technical detail and potential bug in a software tool (Ollama) related to performance metric calculation.
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Only one publisher covered this so far. Single-source stories can still rank when the publisher is high-authority, but they lack cross-source corroboration.
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High
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Breaking (< 6h)
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COVERAGE [1]

  1. dev.to — LLM tag TIER_1 (CA) · Ivan Stankovic ·

    Ollama says my model does 13,826 tokens/sec. It does 43.

    <p>That number is not a typo, and my GPU has not improved. Both figures came out of the same daemon, from the same prompt, thirty seconds apart.</p> <p>If you have Ollama running, you can check this on your own machine before you read any further. Send the same prompt twice and p…

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