Open inference engines give you many knobs and it’s easy to turn the wrong ones. In this 5-minute lightning talk, I’ll share one concrete lesson from tuning an open-source model server for better real-world performance: what we changed, what metric we watched, and what surprised us.

The goal isn’t a full benchmark suite. It’s a tight takeaway you can reuse when comparing open serving stacks or tuning memory, concurrency, and startup behavior on GPU hosts. Come for one practical lesson; leave with a sharper instinct for which knobs matter first.