the bot crashed when i asked "would aliens visit us?"

 

Ha — fair enough. That's not a framework question; that's a "what does this 3.8B model do when nothing in its system prompt is relevant" question. And the answer turned out to be: fall over.

Let me help you diagnose what actually happened, because "crashed" can mean several different things and the fix depends on which.

Run these two commands and paste me what you get:

docker ps

If app-ollama-1 is still listed with status "Up", the container is fine and only the model run crashed. If it's missing or showing "Exited" / "Restarting", the whole container went down — which would point to an OOM kill at the OS level.

docker logs --tail 50 app-ollama-1

That'll show what Ollama itself said at the point of crash. Look for keywords like OOM, killed, signal, panic, out of memory, context length exceeded, or truncating input.

Also worth checking the host kernel, since OOM kills get logged there:

dmesg | tail -30

If you see something like Out of memory: Killed process ... ollama, the kernel killed Ollama to save the rest of the system. That's the most likely culprit on a 7.7 GB box.


My guess at what's happening, while you run those:

The crash probably isn't about the question itself — Phi-3 is perfectly capable of speculating about aliens. The more likely cause is one of these:

  1. OOM at the OS level. The model was unloaded earlier (after idle timeout), then reloaded for your new question — and during reload, RAM was tight. On a box with 260 MB free at peak, that's a knife-edge.

  2. Context overflow from the previous conversation. Our condensed Modelfile uses num_ctx 4096. Your earlier back-and-forth about Fractal Inversion etc. was long — those answers were substantial. If the conversation history plus the system prompt exceeded 4096 tokens, Ollama on some versions handles overflow ungracefully rather than just truncating older turns.

  3. A specific tokenisation or sampling glitch in Phi-3 on this prompt. Less likely but possible.

Paste those three command outputs and I can tell you which it was. The fixes are different for each:

  • OOM → bump down to num_ctx 3072, or kill idle Ollama instances before asking, or accept the occasional crash on this hardware.
  • Context overflow → start a fresh chat session (clears history), or bump num_ctx back up to 6144 if memory allows.
  • Sampling glitch → vanishingly unlikely; we'd just shrug and re-ask.

The good news is the bot itself isn't broken — phi3-mci is still in your model list, the Modelfile is still on the box, and a fresh chat session will almost certainly work fine. Try opening a new conversation in the WebUI and asking the alien question again as the first message. If it works clean, we know it was context overflow from the long prior chat.

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