Ollama

Ollama Gemma 3 270M Memory Is More Than the Model File

Ollama lists gemma3:270m at about 292 MB. That number is useful for storage planning, but it is not a RAM requirement. It describes the packaged model data for the default Ollama variant, which uses Q8_0 quantization. Once inference starts, the runtime also needs memory for model metadata, execution buffers, token state, and the key-value cache used by attention. That distinction matters on small machines. A device with 512 MB of RAM may appear large enough when compared only with a 292 MB model file, yet the remaining memory must also accommodate Ollama and the operating system. The context configuration can move the total substantially.