Problems / LLM serving, medium

Decode is the bottleneck

Disaggregated serving with a small decode pool: answers got longer and decode slots fill up.

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Your goals

Success ≥ 99%, p99 ≤ 5 s.

Test cases

Like a coding problem, a solution has to pass every case, not just the one it was built for. Submit in the lab runs all 3; 1 of them are hidden until then.

  1. As given. The problem’s own traffic, scheduled failures and seed.
  2. A server dies. One replica of the service with the most replicas is killed for part of the run.

The traffic

120 requests a second for 30 seconds: 100% request (reads).

The system

What each component does in this design, and what calls it. The simulator mimics each one from these settings.

ComponentIts job hereSettings
Load balancerLoad balancerTraffic enters here.Calls AI app.Layer 4 balancers route by IP and port; layer 7 balancers read HTTP and can route by path or header.–
AI appApp serviceLoad balancer forwards to it.Calls Prefill GPU pool, Decode GPU pool.Little's law: throughput ≈ concurrency ÷ latency. 200 slots at 50 ms serve about 4,000 req/s.3 replicas × 500 slots · timeout 30 s
Prefill GPU poolPrefill GPU poolAI app calls it.Splitting prefill (reading the prompt) from decode (writing the answer) onto separate GPUs stops long prompts from stalling everyone else’s output.128 slots
Decode GPU poolDecode GPU poolAI app calls it.Decoding is memory-bound: each request holds its KV cache in GPU memory for as long as it generates.128 slots

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