# Lightweight Scheduling Policies for Continuously Batched LLM Serving Across GPU Architectures

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15899 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15899/

## 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 5 of its 8 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 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, 5 of 5)

- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [DistServe: Disaggregating Prefill and Decoding for Goodput-optimized Large Language Model Serving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09670/) (2024)
- [SARATHI: Efficient LLM Inference by Piggybacking Decodes with Chunked Prefills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16369/) (2023)
- [Fast Distributed Inference Serving for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05920/) (2023)
- [Efficient LLM Scheduling by Learning to Rank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15792/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language model serving is increasingly limited not only by model size and GPU speed, but also by scheduling during autoregressive decoding, where continuous batching interleaves requests at token granularity as sequences arrive and finish. We study whether lightweight scheduling policies can improve latency-throughput tradeoffs without changing model architectures, kernels, or deploying learned schedulers. We implement a Python/PyTorch continuous-batching testbench with real Hugging Face execution and evaluate eight policies across 1,152 GPU-model-scheduler-workload runs using ShareGPT-derived traffic, six Qwen, Gemma, and Mistral models, and Modal L40S, A100, and H100 GPUs. Scheduler choice changes throughput, TTFT, completion latency, and tail behavior under fixed model, GPU, workload, batch size, and prefill budget. Aging shortest-prompt-first is the strongest practical baseline in many L40S and mixed-workload settings, while oracle remaining-length scheduling shows that job-size knowledge alone is insufficient because batching and hardware effects also shape performance. The custom dataset has been uploaded to Hugging Face.