LLM Community · Why does llm use twice the memory of comparable tools?

Most llm articles stop at "how to use it" and never cover "when not to use it". This is an attempt at the second half.

One last trap: in container environments remember to adjust the memory-related parameters in step. Otherwise the host limit and the process expectation disagree, and the symptom is intermittent, unreproducible failure.

-- The query that broke: a full scan over 20M rows.
-- A composite index took P99 from 1.8s down to 42ms.
SELECT id, title, created_at
  FROM posts
 WHERE community_id = ?
   AND status = 1
 ORDER BY score DESC
 LIMIT 20;

On trade-offs, my view is this: if nobody on the team owns this area long-term, do not introduce a second mechanism. With two coexistence you first have to work out which one is even in play when things break, and that costs far more than the performance you saved.

Worth noting: the official docs do cover this, just in a very inconspicuous spot. I only found it reading the source comments, where the author explains the reasoning — roughly "so that it degrades into predictable behaviour in extreme cases".