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Draw the throughput versus latency curve for LLM serving and explain where you would operate on it.

Separate device throughput bounds from measured service curves, then choose a feasible operating point using latency, quality and goodput.

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Separate device throughput bounds from measured service curves, then choose a feasible operating point using latency, quality and goodput.

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Work through the numbers

Change the assumptions in a free calculator, then explain what the result establishes and what still needs measurement.

The concepts behind this question

Use these concept explanations to review the ideas behind this question.

Foundational

🚀 Inference & Serving

Latency Metrics: TTFT, TPOT and GoodputRead a stream from its timestamps: distinguish first-token wait, individual gaps and average generation pace. Compute goodput with explicit deadlines, denominators and failure accounting.

Advanced

🧮 Napkin Math & Capacity🔒 Premium

Bandwidth-Bound Decode ThroughputEstimate decode throughput from bytes per step, then separate aggregate output from per-user pace. A finite-memory example shows how batching, cache reads and quantization change the bound.

Foundational

🚀 Inference & Serving

The KV CacheThe KV cache saves attention keys and values from processed tokens. Follow one decode step, calculate its memory cost, and see why longer conversations reduce the number of requests a GPU can hold.

Foundational

🧮 Open Weights & Serving Engines

Serving Benchmarks That Do Not LieDesign reproducible serving experiments with realistic arrivals, cache state and failure accounting. Interpret latency-qualified throughput and conditional per-rank bounds without turning optimistic kernel estimates into production capacity.

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UP NEXT ON YOUR JOURNEY

Next in this trackDesign the fastest serving path for a 70B model with a 200 ms TTFT target at production scale.Next in this tracknvidia-smi shows 30 percent utilization on our serving fleet. Is that a problem, and what would you look at instead?Next in this trackWhat changes when you serve a vision-language model instead of a text-only one?

FEDITOR'S NOTE

Distinguish the batch-size calculation from an arrival-rate experiment. Check memory feasibility and successful request throughput before choosing a point on the latency curve.

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