Spent the day comparing two ways of running a model locally: Ollama, which I know, and Colibri, which I installed last night. Same model on both, Qwen3-Coder 30B.
- Fell: the 19 GB Colibri download stalled overnight, and the Ollama one stalled at the very end and started again from 2%. My desktop ran out of memory twice with both tools and a browser open.
- Got up: moved the test to my Linux server. The model arrived in five minutes there, and the engine built in 25 seconds.
- Learned: on the same machine the two were close, about 10 tokens a second each. On my busy desktop one
Colibri flag,
--cap 128, made it 4.5 times faster.
Wrote it up: Ollama or Colibri? A beginner’s comparison. Next: point a coding agent at Colibri and see whether it keeps up.