---
url: "https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1x8lwa1/if_youre_on_strata_before_0145_and_your_client/"
title: "if you're on Strata before 0.1.45 and your client doesn't set sampling, you're running greedy"
source_kind: reddit
subreddit: LocalLLaMA
author: Distinct-Pie2389
captured: "2026-10-21T19:30:15+00:00"
comment_tree: false
topics: [local-inference, strata]
summary: A user shares Strata configuration tips for avoiding greedy sampling and adjusting route tail skip for quality vs speed on Unsloth 4-bit models.
status: ok
---

Two things I ran into while moving my Strata setup from IQ2_XS to Unsloth's UD-IQ4_XS (RTX 4090, i9-14900K, 64GB DDR5-5800, Arch).
1. Greedy sampling on older builds
Before Strata 0.1.45, a run config without a `sampling` block decoded greedy whenever the request didn't set its own temperature. Greedy is what makes these models loop.
0.1.45 fixed this upstream (#2685). A request with no sampling now gets the model card's values:
- Thinking: temp 1.0, top_p 0.95, top_k 20 - Non-thinking: temp 0.7, top_p 0.8, top_k 20, presence penalty 1.5

Those match Unsloth's recommended settings for Qwen3.8-Flash-Next. Anything your client sends still wins. The web chat page also stopped sending its stored 0.6 temperature.
On 0.1.44 or older? Update, or add this to your run config:
"sampling": {"temperature": 1.0, "top_p": 0.95, "top_k": 20}
2. Route tail skip on the Unsloth 4-bit files
Since 0.1.42 the default is `STRATA_ROUTE_TAIL_SKIP=7`. It skips low-ranked experts the cache missed, which buys speed. Strata's QUANTS.md measured it doubling the Unsloth 4-bit file's KL against Q8_0 in RAM-budget mode (0.053 to 0.115). If you moved up to a 4-bit quant for quality, the default hands a lot of that back.
My A/B on UD-IQ4_XS, 262K context, same config otherwise:
- Skip 7 (default): 93 t/s decode at 36K, 93 t/s at 136K - Skip 0: 72 t/s at 36K, 81 t/s at 136K - Prompt speed was the same: ~2,000 t/s at 36K, ~2,900 t/s at 136K

I went with quality.
In your run config:
"env": {"STRATA_ROUTE_TAIL_SKIP": "0"}
Also worth running: Strata's calibrator (`tools/calibrate.py <your config>`, ~30 min). On my box it moved `--spec-min-p` from 0.5 to 0.7 for about +4%, and it confirmed `--pcie-frac 0.20`. Anything at 0.55 or higher cost me 20-40%.
Credit to the Strata dev for both. The fix and the measurements are upstream. I only noticed because my old configs had no sampling block.
Tonight: UD-IQ4_XS on Strata against NInfer with the dense Qwen3.8 27B on the same 4090, on real coding tasks.