Dual-Pool Token-Budget Routing for Cost-Efficient and Reliable LLM Serving
Production vLLM fleets typically provision each instance for the worst-case context length, leading to substantial KV-cache over-allocation and under-utilized concurrency. In practice, 80-95% of requests are short, yet are served under configurations optimized for long contexts, wasting 4-8$\times$ throughput capacity and triggering reliability issues such as OOM crashes, preemption, and request rejections. We identify a common root cause for these inefficiencies: configuration-traffic mismatch. We propose dual-pool token-budget routing, a lightweight dispatch mechanism that partitions a homogeneous fleet into two specialized pools: a high-throughput short-context pool and a high-capacity...
| Authors | Xunzhuo Liu, Bowei He, Xue Liu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 9 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 April 2026 |
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