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The VRAM Etiquette: A 102 GB Model Library and a Charter Against Overstepping

2026-10-14 · ~7 min read · ComfyUI · VRAM · human-agent boundary · AI workflow · charter

The more powerful the tool, the more its boundaries need to be written in plain text. On this day, a charter on “borrowing someone else’s GPU” was established article by article in back-and-forth negotiation.

I. Inventory: a 102 GB armory

After the request was approved, the first command was not starting but a full read-only scan of the model library (read-only, no loading). The inventory portrait followed: 14 base models (102 GB) in three families — the Illustrious XL family (anime/stylized SDXL) eight mainstays (illustriousStrange_v10, prefectIllustriousXL_v8, waiIllustriousSDXL_v160, oneObsession_v24, waiANIPONYXL_v140, JANKUTrainedChenkinNoobai, etc., several NSFW-oriented — unneeded for direction A, ignored), one realistic/semi-realistic (divingIllustriousReal_v70VAE, metadata confirming DucHaiten-NoobAI-Realistic), general/others (sd_xl_base_1.0 official SDXL base, moodyKrea2Mix_v70 fourteen GB with no metadata and unknown architecture — if it is Flux-family it would blow the 8 GB VRAM directly, so it is not used, CheckpointYesmix_v15 an old SD1.5-era model). 9 LoRAs, all character/anime-IP-oriented (Marin, Neri, Mingchao Lynae, etc.) plus two wan2.2 video LoRAs, none dark-fantasy-oriented. ControlNet, upscale, embeddings all empty — so the workflow can only be pure text-to-image, with no control flows available. VAE has ae.safetensors and others. The file-header metadata of several candidate base models was read one by one (read-only, no loading), confirming their true types and styles.

II. The etiquette: three articles of the charter

The charter was established article by article in negotiation. The first came from the user’s warning: “did you download ComfyUI? I have it locally” — clarification: no network download behavior whatsoever; the 2.6 GB 7z on the F: drive was the user’s local package all along, merely in archived state, and the extraction used entirely local files. The second was the red line the user drew: “you may use my software and models, but you may not change my original settings and models and such” — the rules were noted: do not touch any settings or models, must inform before starting ComfyUI (the user has many programs open; excessive VRAM usage causes crashes, and a crash means no generation), and generated assets sorted into the ai game folder. The third was the coordinates of the model: “my models are in F:\comfyui\ComfyUI-aki-v3\ComfyUI-aki-v3\ComfyUI\models\checkpoints; the question is what workflow do you want to use? Deploy it yourself? You can try A first” — the base-model choice was handed back to the user, with the plan only making recommendations.

III. Contingency: the arithmetic of 8 GB of VRAM

The work plan after approval put the VRAM arithmetic in plain sight: the RTX 3070 is 8 GB, and SDXL at 832×1216 peaks at about 7.5-9 GB — there is a risk of blowing VRAM. So the resolution was lowered to 768×1152 (enough for samples, peaking at about 6-7 GB), conservative mode added to the launch parameters (—medvram, slower but stable), and ComfyUI closed immediately after generation to free VRAM. The first launch failure contributed one discovery: this version of ComfyUI no longer has the —medvram parameter (the new parameter is —lowvram). The user then said “forget it, I will start ComfyUI myself. Do not touch it” — the negotiation entered its final chapter: ComfyUI is entirely under the user’s control, all started processes stopped clean (port 8188 released, no residues), the earlier extracted copy kept or deleted awaits one word from the user, and the already-delivered art sample board is unaffected.

IV. Final chapter: one accident and an abdication

After the overwrite accident (detailed in The Shadow Cards Art Chronicle), the charter was elevated to iron law: “I fixed it. You are not allowed to make any changes to ComfyUI, including but not limited to configuration, files, settings, etc. All you can do is create a workflow yourself to generate assets, and the generated assets sorted into the ai game folder.” Every image generation since then follows this clean path: confirm the user is running it → submit the self-built txt2img workflow via API → outputs land in ComfyUI’s own output (not touched, not deleted) → copy one to the project and register the license. The wound of the accident was also honestly inventoried: .app_path zeroed is the direct cause of death, code files overwritten by the old version, two launch residues — and all the user’s models intact (the 102 GB timestamps unchanged, confirmed item by item), which is the most important sentence in the entire wound-assessment report.

Between the owner of a tool and the borrower of a tool, the best relationship is not intimacy but each writing the boundaries clearly.

Real coordinates

ComfyUI VRAM human-agent boundary AI workflow charter

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