Is Ollama actually slow or am I missing something?

This Reddit thread addresses a common question among Ollama users about whether the tool's perceived slowness is inherent or due to misconfiguration. Ollama's performance is a real concern — multiple community benchmarks and developer reports have shown that running the same model through Ollama produces fewer tokens per second compared to running it through llama.cpp directly, and the gap is tangible enough to feel during use. Key contributing factors include choosing a model size that exceeds available VRAM, which forces Ollama to offload layers to system RAM or disk , as well as Ollama's default behavior of unloading models from memory after just 5 minutes of inactivity , causing slow cold-reload times on subsequent requests.

Related

• Openclaw with Gemma4 26B extremely slow and forget stuff
• llama4 108b
• Can't get a good coding setup on Macbook Pro M3 Max 36GB
• Tried running LLMs locally to save API costs… ended up waiting 13 minutes for ONE response 🤡

Source: r/ollama | 2026-04-15