I switched over from ollama to llama.cpp and then spent weeks copying flag recipes out of Reddit threads with no idea whether any of them helped on *my* hardware. `-ngl 35`? Why 35? Someone with a 3090 said so.

So I built **Model Loader**. It's a web UI for llama.cpp that runs in one Docker container next to your existing setup, detects your llama and openwebui instances and just makes the cutting edge a little more dull.

* **It reads your actual GPU and llama setup** and tells you which context sizes fit and which don't  and when one doesn't and what it'd cost to make it fit. [\[screenshot\]](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/scratchhax/model-loader/main/docs/model_performance_selector.png)
* **Every setting has a tooltip** explaining what it does in plain English. \~100 of them. This was the part I actually needed. [\[screenshot\]](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/scratchhax/model-loader/main/docs/models_ini.png)
* **It shows you the command line it builds.**  It's not hiding llama.cpp from you, it's teaching it. Copy it out and run it yourself if you want.
* **Benchmark on your own box.** Change a setting, run the same prompts, see if it actually got faster, it stores the results and makes them easy to see next time you find a neat tweak. [\[screenshot\]](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/scratchhax/model-loader/main/docs/benchmarks.png)
* **models at a glance**  what's downloaded, what's configured, what's loaded right now, and whether each one is MoE or dense. [\[screenshot\]](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/scratchhax/model-loader/main/docs/models_available.png)
* Plus HF search with a resumable parallel downloader [\[screenshot\]](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/scratchhax/model-loader/main/docs/downloader.png), a GPU dashboard [\[screenshot\]](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/scratchhax/model-loader/main/docs/model_loader.png), and OpenWebUI sync.

I haven't edited a setting by hand since Claude and I put this together. 

**Fair warning:** I am not a developer and this is a homelab tool. No auth, keep it on your LAN. 

[https://github.com/scratchhax/model-loader](https://github.com/scratchhax/model-loader)

I made an app to help me optimize llama parameters on my hardware