# Echo: Efficient Co-Scheduling of Hybrid Online-Offline Tasks for Large Language Model Serving

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.03651 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03651/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Serving systems and request scheduling, one of 12 directions in Efficient LLM inference and serving.
- Builds on 29 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Mar 2025.

## Placed in

- Efficient LLM inference and serving / [Serving systems and request scheduling](https://mlsanity.com/inference/serving-systems-and-request-scheduling/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Code Llama: Open Foundation Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12950/) (2023)
- [What Makes Good In-Context Examples for GPT-3?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06804/) (2021)
- [ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12793/) (2024)
- [NExT-QA:Next Phase of Question-Answering to Explaining Temporal Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08276/) (2021)
- [DistServe: Disaggregating Prefill and Decoding for Goodput-optimized Large Language Model Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09670/) (2024)
- [FlexGen: High-Throughput Generative Inference of Large Language Models with a Single GPU](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06865/) (2023)
- [Splitwise: Efficient generative LLM inference using phase splitting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18677/) (2023)
- [Efficiently Scaling Transformer Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05102/) (2022)
- [Taming Throughput-Latency Tradeoff in LLM Inference with Sarathi-Serve](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02310/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Large Language Models for News Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13848/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Rankers for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08845/) (2023)
- [Inference Scaling Laws: An Empirical Analysis of Compute-Optimal Inference for Problem-Solving with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00724/) (2024)
- [LooGLE: Can Long-Context Language Models Understand Long Contexts?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04939/) (2023)
- [Cost-Efficient Large Language Model Serving for Multi-turn Conversations with CachedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19708/) (2024)
- [Inference without Interference: Disaggregate LLM Inference for Mixed Downstream Workloads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11181/) (2024)
- [LoongServe: Efficiently Serving Long-Context Large Language Models with Elastic Sequence Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09526/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Open-Domain Question Answering in the Era of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06984/) (2023)
- [SpotServe: Serving Generative Large Language Models on Preemptible Instances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15566/) (2023)
- [S3: Increasing GPU Utilization during Generative Inference for Higher Throughput](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06000/) (2023)
- [MoE-Lightning: High-Throughput MoE Inference on Memory-constrained GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.11217/) (2024)
- [FastDecode: High-Throughput GPU-Efficient LLM Serving using Heterogeneous Pipelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11421/) (2024)
- [Andes: Defining and Enhancing Quality-of-Experience in LLM-Based Text Streaming Services](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16283/) (2024)
- [BlendServe: Optimizing Offline Inference for Auto-regressive Large Models with Resource-aware Batching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16102/) (2024)
- [Pie: Pooling CPU Memory for LLM Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09317/) (2024)
- [Efficient Heterogeneous Large Language Model Decoding with Model-Attention Disaggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01814/) (2024)
- [Fast and exact analysis for LRU caches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01670/) (2018)
- [Saving GPU Hours in LLM Inference System Development and Online Workloads with Simulation and DBMS-Inspired Cache Replacement Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07447/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [CoDec: Prefix-Shared Decoding Kernel for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17694/) (2025)
- [xLLM Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14686/) (2025)
- [ProServe: Unified Multi-Priority Request Scheduling for LLM Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12928/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models have been widely deployed in various applications, encompassing both interactive online tasks and batched offline tasks. Given the burstiness and latency sensitivity of online tasks, over-provisioning resources is common practice. This allows for the integration of latency-insensitive offline tasks during periods of low online load, enhancing resource utilization. However, strategically serving online and offline tasks through a preemption mechanism fails to fully leverage the flexibility of offline tasks and suffers from KV cache recomputation and irregular workloads. In this paper, we introduce Echo, a collaborative online-offline task serving system, including a scheduler, a KV cache manager, and estimation toolkits. The scheduler and KV cache manager work tightly to maximize the throughput of offline tasks, while the estimator further predicts execution time to ensure online task SLOs. The scheduler leverages the batch information of last iteration to reduce the search space for finding the optimal schedule. The KV cache manager sets the priority of the KV cache based on the type of tasks and the opportunity of prefix sharing to reduce the recomputation. Finally, the estimation toolkits predict the execution time, future memory consumption, and the throughput of offline tasks to guide the scheduler, KV cache manager, and the system deployer. Evaluation based on real-world workloads demonstrates that Echo can increase offline task throughput by up to 3.3×, while satisfying online task SLOs.
