Benchmarking Self-Hosted Gemma 2 9B vs. Frontier APIs: The FP8 Quantization Prefill Tax and VRAM Realities on an NVIDIA L4 [P]

When evaluating migrating production LLM workloads off commercial cloud APIs, the conversation usually gets oversimplified into a trade-off between quality and infrastructure cost. To look past clean, isolated averages, I built a repeatable evaluation matrix using a real-world workload: cold outreach and contextual profile re-engineering for my resume generation platform. I benchmarked an unquantized Gemma 2 9B against an optimized