misc : prevent RAM peaking at model loading stage - #27483
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@CISC @ggerganov gentle reminder |
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I have no particular stake in this, LGTM though, @ggerganov? |
ggerganov
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Overview
For models where embeddings have a larger memory footprint than context, peak RAM occurs during model loading when repack is enabled. This makes peak RAM constant across different context lengths.
E.g. here

This PR changes the order of tensors during repack and move the peak to the beginning. I also moved from a single always-growing buffer to per-tensor buffers. There will be more allocations, but no peak.
Here is how it looks after the change

Additional information
The first thing I tried was an in-place repack, and indeed it worked, but the changes were very intrusive and required changes to ggml and backends.
Requirements