RFD 1165: Fine-tuning exhausts the desk card, and batch size is the lever
Problem
Two walls stopped this compile, and they are different walls.
The first was system memory. Statistics Collector took SIGKILL at Docker’s 30.26 GiB; raising .wslconfig to 48 GB cleared it and the stage completed in 14:58. The run peaked at 39.87 GiB, 85 per cent of the new ceiling and well above the old, so the lift was load-bearing.
The second is video memory, and no amount of system RAM answers it:
AccelerasResourceError: GPU memory has been exhausted. Please
try Quantization-Aware Fine-Tuning with lower batch size.QAFT ran about thirty minutes of epoch 1 of 4 on 1024 frames and exhausted 24 GiB. RFD 1140 says match the card to the wall you hit; clearing the RAM ceiling only bought the right to meet this one.
Decision
RETRACTED 2026-08-29: this said batch size was the lever, and it is not. A probe at batch_size=1, epochs=1 on 64 frames raised the same AccelerasResourceError after 44 minutes.
The requirement is measured: QAFT needs 32.5 GiB, on an A40. The desk 3090 holds 24, so the shortfall is 8.5 GiB and no batch size closes it. Separately, a16_w16 is refused by this part outright – twelve precision_change layers the target will not take – so a8_w8 is the precision ceiling. DETAILS.md carries both.