Local LLMs Are Eating Your Hardware Alive: Track Costs and Rate Limit Before It's Too Late

The 60-Second TL;DR

• Local LLMs guzzle VRAM via KV cache — track tokens religiously to avoid OOM disasters.
• Token Bucket rate limiting handles bursts while protecting hardware; superior to crude RPM caps.
• Optimization like batching and re-ranking turns prototypes into production beasts — but NVIDIA still wins.