Hey everyone,

I wanted to share my current setup and see if anyone has found a solution for a specific bottleneck I'm hitting.

I'm using a Mac Studio Ultra with 128GB of RAM, building a daily assistant with persistent memory. I'm really happy with the basic OpenClaw architecture: a Main Agent acting as the orchestrator, spawning specialized sub-agents for tasks like web search, PDF analysis, etc.

So far, I've been primarily using Qwen 122B and have recently started experimenting with Gemma. While the system handles complex agent tasks perfectly fine, the response time for "normal" chat is killing me. I'm seeing latencies of 60-90 seconds just for a simple greeting or a short interaction. It completely breaks the flow of a daily assistant.

My current workaround is to use a cloud model for the Main Agent. This solves the speed issue immediately, but it's not what I wanted—the goal was a local-first, private setup.

Is anyone else experiencing this massive gap between "Agent task performance" and "Chat latency" on Apple Silicon?

Are there specific optimizations for the Main Agent to make it "snappier" for simple dialogue without sacrificing the reasoning needed for orchestration? Or perhaps model recommendations that hit the sweet spot between intelligence and speed on 128GB of unified memory?