GPU OOM / VRAM sharing

Multiple services share one RTX 3090 (24GB). They coordinate without a central scheduler: everyone tries to load normally, catches OOM, waits for others to auto-unload, and retries.

Retry convention

On CUDA OOM: torch.cuda.empty_cache(), time.sleep(30), retry — up to 3 attempts, 30s apart. Re-raise non-OOM errors immediately and re-raise after the final attempt. Same idea in shell: loop a GPU command 3 times with a 30s sleep between failures. Alongside retry, configure every service to unload quickly when idle.

Known services and settings

• Ollama already handles unload — just set quick keep-alive in /etc/systemd/system/ollama.service.d/override.conf:

`` Environment="OLLAMAKEEPALIVE=30s" ``

• Invoice OCR (Qwen2-VL) at http://10.99.0.3:8765 — auto-unloads after idle (--auto-unload-minutes, default 5), does 3×/30s OOM retry, and exposes POST /request-unload and GET /status.
• Whisper large-v3 ≈ 6GB VRAM (see the Whisper-Transcription skill).

Signaling protocol

For faster, more predictable starts, a service can call POST /request-unload on the others before loading a big model instead of relying on OOM-retry delays. The endpoint contracts (/request-unload, /status, the auto-unload background task), the coordinator usage pattern, and worked timelines are in reference-gpu-coordination.md. Helper script: requestgpuunload.py in the OneCuriousRabbit repo.