Discovered vibevoice sitting at 3.2GB resident GPU memory with
loaded_models: [] and no idle-unload ever firing for it again. Root cause:
a load attempt had OOM'd partway through (competing with an unrelated
ollama process on the same GPU), so _MODEL_CACHE was never populated —
the idle-unload loop only clears that cache, so it had nothing to act on,
even though the partially-constructed model had already left memory
allocated. gc.collect()+empty_cache() don't reliably reclaim memory from
an interrupted from_pretrained() call.
Confirmed a plain process restart does fully reclaim it, so each worker
now treats any load failure as fatal: log it and os._exit(1), letting
supervisord's autorestart=true respawn a clean process immediately.
Verified with a bogus model id — worker exits, respawns, and passes the
smoke test right after.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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