I restarted a 10 year old Xeon 174 times to delete twelve flags and gain four tokens a second

A follow-up to running Gemma 4 on a 2016 Xeon. I took that 25-flag config apart one flag at a time, to find which ones actually do the work, which are harmful, and which are just pitfalls. Most of my tuned config will do nothing for the typical user. A couple of weeks ago I got Gemma 4, a 26-billion-parameter model, running at reading speed on a 2016 Xeon with no GPU and 128 GB of DDR3 . That post…