Single-GPU bench on dash1 GPU 0 (vanilla vLLM 0.18.1, chunked-prefill on,
no kv_connector). 3 decode batch sizes × 5 prefill sizes × 3 reps.
Method recap (driver: microbench/interference/driver.py, repurposed):
- Pin D streaming decode requests at constant max_tokens
- Inject one prefill-only request (max_tokens=1) of varying input length
- Bin decode-stream token timestamps into "during prefill" vs baseline
- Headline metric: effective per-stream TPOT during the prefill burst,
= prefill_ttft / (num_tokens_during_prefill / D). This is the average
rate at which each decode stream produces tokens during the burst.
p50 of inter-token intervals is deceptive (chunked-prefill makes most
intervals look normal); the burst-average gives the true cost.
Results (D=8 row, the most agentic-realistic case):
P (tokens) | prefill_ttft | per-stream TPOT during | penalty
2048 | 143 ms | 32 ms | 4×
8192 | 583 ms | 114 ms | 15×
32768 | 4520 ms | 388 ms | 52×
65536 | 15615 ms | 757 ms | 99×
131072 | 56991 ms | 1419 ms | 183×
Baseline TPOT at D=8: ~7.7 ms. So during a 131k-token prefill burst
each ongoing decode is running ~183× slower (i.e. essentially halted)
for ~57 seconds.
§3.2 implication: PD-disagg's promised phase-isolation benefit per
agentic request is bounded by the decode duration, which is 50–200 ms
for tool-call output. MB2 says the KV-transfer cost of PD-disagg
is 300 ms – 10 s for agentic-size requests. Cost > benefit for every
KV size above ~80 MiB (well below trace mean 192 MiB).
The new figs/pd_cost_vs_benefit.png overlays MB1 benefit ceiling
(50–200 ms band, capped by decode) onto MB2 transfer cost curve and
marks the agentic-distribution waypoints (trace mean, p90, p95, p99)
on the x-axis. Across the entire agentic distribution, the cost curve
sits above the benefit band.
Adds:
- microbench/fresh_setup/mb1_launch.sh: single-GPU vLLM launcher (no
kv_connector, default chunked_prefill=on, max_num_batched_tokens=8192)
- microbench/fresh_setup/mb1_driver.py: copy of the existing
microbench/interference/driver.py for cpfs deployment
- microbench/fresh_setup/analyze_mb1.py: aggregator emitting
per-(D, P) effective-TPOT-during + max PD-disagg-benefit table
- microbench/fresh_setup/plot_mb1.py: mb1 standalone +
pd_cost_vs_benefit headline figure
- analysis/mb1/summary.csv: 45 raw rows from the sweep
- analysis/mb1/breakdown.json: per-(D, P) aggregate
- analysis/mb1/README.md: persistent doc
- figs/mb1_interference.png: effective TPOT during prefill, one line per D
- figs/pd_cost_vs_benefit.png: §3.2 headline (cost > benefit everywhere)
Caveats noted in README:
- chunk_tokens=8192 only; Sarathi-Serve's smaller chunks would
interleave decode more aggressively. Chunk-size sensitivity is
flagged as next run.
- D ≤ 8; higher D may saturate or shrink the penalty further.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Gahow Wang
029821c1b6