Ilker ManapandClaude Opus 5
e86457cf02
"Set up a local mirror" was advice. This is the nginx config, the directory layout and the reason the layout has a date in it — a repository that changes upstream changes what you are running, and the first sign is a prompt that worked last week answering differently this week. It says what the mirror is not, because both mistakes are easy. It is not a caching proxy: nothing populates it on demand, deliberately, since a mirror that reaches the internet at the least convenient moment fails in a way that looks like llmgw being broken. And it is not needed at all if you already run a shared filesystem — put the models there, use a path, and nothing is fetched. It also says when a mirror stops being enough, and that llmgw is positioned to distribute between nodes because it already knows which of them hold which weights. That is not built, and the page says so rather than implying it is coming. Every behaviour it relies on was checked against the source: an http:// source is fetched and a path is not, a killed download resumes, a partial file is never visible under the model's name, and a shared filesystem is not counted once per node. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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A model mirror
One machine that holds the model files, so nodes fetch over your own network instead of over the internet.
This is the highest-value piece of infrastructure around llmgw and the cheapest. Eight nodes each pulling forty gigabytes from Hugging Face is a day's work, and on plenty of corporate networks it is not possible at all. From a mirror on the same switch it is minutes.
llmgw needs nothing special for this: a model's source is a URL, and the URL
can be yours.
What it is
An HTTP server serving a directory. That is the whole design.
/srv/models/
qwen2.5-14b-instruct/
2026-03/
q4_k_m.gguf
bge-m3/
2026-01/
model.safetensors
The date in the path is the point of the layout, not decoration. A model repository that changes upstream changes what you are running, and the first sign is a prompt that worked last week answering differently this week with nobody able to say why. Pin it here and that cannot happen.
nginx
server {
listen 80;
server_name models.internal;
root /srv/models;
# Read-only. This is deliberate: a mirror that can be written to over HTTP
# is a way to replace a model with another one, and the nodes would fetch
# it without complaint.
location / {
autoindex on;
# Large files, and the client is a machine with a resumable fetcher.
# Sendfile and no buffering keep memory flat regardless of size.
sendfile on;
tcp_nopush on;
}
}
autoindex is there so a person can browse what is available; llmgw does not
need it.
Filling it
# On the mirror, once per model and version:
mkdir -p /srv/models/qwen2.5-14b-instruct/2026-03
curl -fL -o /srv/models/qwen2.5-14b-instruct/2026-03/q4_k_m.gguf \
"https://huggingface.co/<repo>/resolve/<revision>/<file>"
Use a revision rather than main in the source URL. main is what moves.
Pointing llmgw at it
- name: qwen2.5-14b-instruct
source: http://models.internal/qwen2.5-14b-instruct/2026-03/q4_k_m.gguf
scaling: { min: 2, max: 2 }
profiles:
- name: gpu
engine: vllm
gpu_class: h100-80g
tp: 1
Each node fetches once, in the background, before its engine starts — and
llmgw ctl replicas shows how far along it is while it does. A killed download
resumes rather than restarting, and a partial file is never visible under the
model's name, so an interrupted fetch cannot be handed to an engine.
What this is not
It is not a cache: nothing populates it automatically, and a model you did not put there is not there. That is on purpose. A mirror that fetches on demand is a mirror that reaches the internet at the least convenient moment, and in a network where that is blocked it fails in a way that looks like llmgw being broken.
It is also not a replacement for a shared filesystem. If you already run one
that every node mounts, put the models on it and use a path as the source —
nothing is fetched at all, and llmgw notices the filesystem is shared and will
not count the same free space once per node.
When this stops being enough
Somewhere above ten or twenty nodes, one mirror serving a forty gigabyte file to all of them at once becomes the bottleneck instead of the fix. At that point the options are a filer, a second mirror per rack, or distribution between the nodes themselves.
llmgw knows which nodes already hold which weights — it is in ctl status as
"N models on X/Y nodes" — so distributing between them is a feature it is
positioned to add. It has not been built, because a mirror is enough for
everyone who has needed it so far.