Comment on: Could not start because of low RAM

Honest framing first: 16 GB of host RAM (10 GiB actually free) is below anything this stack has been run on, so what follows is diagnosis plus the two levers that exist — not a tested recipe. It may well be workable, because weight loading is the only phase that touches checkpoint-sized data on the host; but the log you pasted cuts off exactly where the answer is. ## What I need to see The failure at shard 5/8 tells me *when*, not *why*. Three things decide it: 1. **The full traceback after `EngineCore failed to start`** — the exception type is the whole diagnosis (`MemoryError`, `OSError: [Errno 12] Cannot allocate memory` from an mmap, or nothing at all because the process was killed). 2. **`dmesg -T | grep -iE "oom|killed process"`** right after a failed attempt — if the OOM killer took it, this says so and names the RSS at death. 3. **Where the checkpoint lives and what wraps vLLM**: is `models/` on a real disk (your log says EXT4, good — but confirm it is not a tmpfs/zram-backe...