A notable performance discrepancy has been observed between llama.cpp and Ollama in terms of code generation throughput when running the Qwen-3 Coder 32B model locally. The analysis reveals that llama.cpp achieves approximately 70% higher throughput compared to Ollama, despite both using the same model weights and hardware. Potential reasons for this difference include variations in CUDA kernels, attention implementations, context or batching defaults, scheduler or multi-GPU utilization, and overhead from Ollama's runtime or API layer. Understanding these differences is crucial for optimizing performance in machine learning applications. This matters because optimizing code generation throughput can significantly impact computational efficiency and resource utilization in AI model deployment.
