# Tropical: Enhancing SLO Attainment in Disaggregated LLM Serving via SLO-Aware Multiplexing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16264 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.16264/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Serving systems and request scheduling, one of 12 directions in Efficient LLM inference and serving.
- Builds on 27 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2026.

## 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, 27 of 27)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [SGLang: Efficient Execution of Structured Language Model Programs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07104/) (2023)
- [DistServe: Disaggregating Prefill and Decoding for Goodput-optimized Large Language Model Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09670/) (2024)
- [Splitwise: Efficient generative LLM inference using phase splitting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18677/) (2023)
- [Taming Throughput-Latency Tradeoff in LLM Inference with Sarathi-Serve](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02310/) (2024)
- [InternLM2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17297/) (2024)
- [Mooncake: A KVCache-centric Disaggregated Architecture for LLM Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00079/) (2024)
- [Llumnix: Dynamic Scheduling for Large Language Model Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03243/) (2024)
- [Fast Distributed Inference Serving for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05920/) (2023)
- [Inference without Interference: Disaggregate LLM Inference for Mixed Downstream Workloads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11181/) (2024)
- [Serving DNNs like Clockwork: Performance Predictability from the Bottom Up](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02464/) (2020)
- [LoongServe: Efficiently Serving Long-Context Large Language Models with Elastic Sequence Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09526/) (2024)
- [SpotServe: Serving Generative Large Language Models on Preemptible Instances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15566/) (2023)
- [FlashDecoding++: Faster Large Language Model Inference on GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01282/) (2023)
- [MemServe: Context Caching for Disaggregated LLM Serving with Elastic Memory Pool](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17565/) (2024)
- [Serverless in the Wild: Characterizing and Optimizing the Serverless Workload at a Large Cloud Provider](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03423/) (2020)
- [MuxServe: Flexible Spatial-Temporal Multiplexing for Multiple LLM Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02015/) (2024)
- [D'ej`aVu: KV-cache Streaming for Fast, Fault-tolerant Generative LLM Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01876/) (2024)
- [ExeGPT: Constraint-Aware Resource Scheduling for LLM Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07947/) (2024)
- [Andes: Defining and Enhancing Quality-of-Experience in LLM-Based Text Streaming Services](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16283/) (2024)
- [P/D-Serve: Serving Disaggregated Large Language Model at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08147/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

To guarantee service quality in transformer based large language model (LLM) serving, it is essential to meet the latency constraints of both the prefill phase (measured by Time-to-First-Token, TTFT) and the decode phase (measured by Time-per-Output-Token, TPOT). Non-disaggregated serving places prefill and decode on the same worker, while disaggregated serving places the prefill and decode on isolated workers. However, no single architecture excels in both TTFT and TPOT metrics. After conducting a root cause analysis, we concluded that indisaggregated LLM serving, prefill execution has minimal interference with decode execution but result in high queuing times. In contrast,non-disaggregated LLM serving effectively reduces queuing times but introduces significant interference between prefills and decodes. In order to leverage the best aspects of both non-disaggregated anddisaggregated LLM serving, we have designed and implemented Tropical.Tropical introduces an sevice-level objectives (SLO)-aware multiplexing strategy that balances the queuing time and the interference, enabling the LLM serving to achieve high TTFT and TPOT SLOs simultaneously. Our evaluation of real-world datasets reveals that Tropical outperforms both state-of-the-art non-disaggregated and disaggregated LLM serving systems, achieving up to 2.09 more requests within a 90% SLO attainment. Specially, compared to the disaggregated LLM serving system, Tropicalimproves P90 TTFT performance by 9 with only an 15% reduction in P90 TPOT. Against the non-disaggregated LLM serving systems, Tropicaldelivers a 2.8 performance improvement in P90 TPOT while maintaining the same P90 TTFT.