Qwen-3.5 9B Issues on Low‑VRAM GPU; Upgrade to Qwen-3.6 Recommended
Upgrade to Qwen-3.6 or use a GPU with more VRAM to avoid directory and test run issues.
Upgrade to Qwen-3.6 or use a GPU with more VRAM to avoid directory and test run issues.
Summary
Testing Qwen-3.5 9B on a new laptop with an RTX 1000 6GB VRAM reveals two main issues: the model creates deeply nested folder structures when handling directories, and it incorrectly flags successful test runs as failures. These problems are not seen with Gemini-2.5-flash or its lite variant, indicating the issue lies with Qwen-3.5 rather than the terminal harness. The author notes that Qwen-3.5 tool‑calling struggles are reportedly fixed in Qwen-3.6, and there is speculation about future 9B and 14B distillations of Qwen-3.6.
For developers running Qwen-3.5 on low‑VRAM GPUs, upgrading to Qwen-3.6 or using a GPU with more VRAM is advisable to avoid directory handling and test run failures.
This is a practical troubleshooting note for local LLM deployment on constrained hardware.
Key changes
- Qwen-3.5 9B has directory/folder handling issues
- recognizes test run failures
- tool‑calling issues fixed in Qwen-3.6
- Qwen-3.6-27B dense model distillations may allow smaller GPU usage