Mitigating KV Cache Competition to Enhance User Experience in LLM Inference

In Large Language Model (LLM) serving, the KV-cache (KVC) bottleneck causes high tail Time-to-First-Token (TTFT) and Time-Between-Tokens (TBT), impairing user experience, particularly in time-sensitive applications. However, satisfying both TTFT and TBT service-level objectives (SLOs) is challenging. To address this, we propose a system, named CacheOPT for mitigating KV Cache competition, based on key insights from our measurements, incorporating novel components. First, it estimates a request's output length, bounding the deviation with a high specified probability, adjusted based on the request arrival rate. Second, it allocates the estimated KVC demand to a request, and reuses other requests' allocated KVC to avoid preemptions while reducing waiting time. Third, it proactively allocates KVC before instead of at the time a request exhausts its allocation and reserves KVC globally to prevent preemptions. Fourth, it chooses a request that has long TBT SLO, long job remaining time and short preemption time to preempt. Fifth, it selects the shortest-latency strategy between swapping and recomputation for preemptions. Experiments show that CacheOPT achieves up to 3.29$\times$ and 2.83$\times$ lower tail TBT and tail TTFT, 47\% and 53\% higher TTFT and TBT SLO attainments, and supports up to 1.58$\times$ higher request arrival rate than the state-of-the-art methods.

AccelGen: Heterogeneous SLO-Guaranteed High-Throughput LLM Inference Serving for Diverse Applications

In this paper, we consider a mixed-prompt scenario for a large language model (LLM) inference serving system that supports diverse applications with both short prompts and long prompts and heterogeneous SLOs for iteration time. To improve throughput when handling long prompts, previous research introduces a chunking method, but has not addressed heterogeneous SLOs. To address the limitation, we propose AccelGen, a high-throughput LLM inference serving system with heterogeneous SLO guarantees for diverse applications. AccelGen introduces four core components: (1) SLO-guaranteed dynamic chunking, which dynamically adjusts chunk sizes to maximize GPU compute utilization while meeting iteration-level SLOs; (2) Iteration-level SLO-based task prioritization, which prioritizes tight-SLO requests and batches requests with similar SLOs; (3) Multi-resource-aware batching, which selects queued requests to maximize the utilizations of both GPU compute resource and key-value cache (KVC). Trace-driven real experiments demonstrate that AccelGen achieves 1.42-11.21X higher throughput, 1.43-13.71X higher goodput, 37-90% higher SLO attainment, and 1.61-12.22X lower response latency compared to the state-of-the-art approaches. It achieves performance near the Oracle, which optimally maximizes goodput.