PrefixBench-H100: Characterizing Prefix Reuse and Time-to-First-Token in H100 LLM Serving

Prefix caching is a key latency optimization for autoregressive LLM serving, yet existing systems assume dense per-token key/value reuse. State-space models change the structure of the problem: a recurrent layer can resume from a single stored state rather than requiring the entire token history. This asymmetry opens a new design point between no reuse and dense caching: store exact recurrent states at a sparse set of checkpoint positions and, on a cache hit, resume from the deepest stored checkpoint and recompute the remaining suffix exactly. We formalize sparse prefix caching as checkpoint placement under a distribution over overlap depths, yielding an exact O(NM) dynamic program. For use cases where requests share a non-trivial prefix (e.g. asking different questions about a single long document), we show that our method consistently improves the Pareto frontier traced by standard heuristics on real-world data. Across QuALITY and System Prompts, distribution-aware placement dominates every fixed-budget baseline on the measured layer-group Pareto frontier and matches or outperforms the strongest heuristic (block caching) while typically using substantially fewer checkpoints, with the largest gains at low checkpoint budgets where the overlap distribution is most non-uniform. The method is most relevant when many requests share a substantial but not identical prefix within a retained cache entry. It preserves exact outputs, does not change the recurrent computation itself or require new recurrent update kernels, applies to recurrent/SSM layers whose hidden state can be extracted and restored exactly, and for hybrid models can be combined with existing KV-cache compression techniques.

Prefix caching is a key optimization in Large Language Model (LLM) serving, reusing attention Key-Value (KV) states across requests with shared prompt prefixes to reduce expensive prefill computation. However, its benefit depends critically on the eviction policy as GPU memory is scarce, and existing policies such as LRU largely treat cached blocks uniformly. This view ignores a fundamental property of LLM prompts: not all tokens are equally worth caching. We show that different token types within a prompt, including system prompts, user queries, tool outputs, model responses, and chain-of-thought reasoning, exhibit up to 756x variation in reuse rates, yet no existing eviction policy exploits this signal. In this paper, we present SAECache (Semantic-Adaptive Eviction for prefix caches), a semantic-adaptive prefix cache eviction policy that addresses this gap through three innovations: (1) a multi-queue architecture that routes KV blocks to task-specific queues with tailored priority metrics, capturing both session reuse in multi-turn requests and structural reuse in templated single-turn requests; (2) a semantic-aware token weighting mechanism that learns the reuse value of different token types online through eviction feedback; and (3) a fully adaptive online learning schema for all parameter updates, including log-normal timing parameters, position decay power, queue weights, and meta-parameters, which eliminates manual tuning and enables automatic adaptation to deployment-specific workload characteristics. Through extensive evaluation across heterogeneous workloads, we demonstrate that SAECache achieves 1.4x-2.7x TTFT improvement over production-style baselines, while fixed-parameter alternatives can degrade by up to 2.7x under workload mismatch -- a failure mode our adaptive approach avoids entirely.

Auto-regressive token generation in large language models is memory-bound because it requires "attending to" key and value tensors (KV cache) of all previous tokens. Prior work aims to improve the efficiency of this decode process by batching multiple requests together, and maximizing batch size subject to GPU memory constraints. The key observation of our work is that with prefix-sharing workloads, smaller, prefix-homogeneous batches -- where all requests share a common prefix -- can achieve higher decode throughput than larger, heterogeneous batches, due to better spatial and temporal locality during KV cache accesses. However, prefix-aware schedulers in state-of-the-art inference engines maximize prefix reuse within a batch only to reduce KV cache memory footprint, but do not stop batch formation at smaller homogeneous batches that could have performed better. Further, we show that shared prefix detection in existing schedulers relies on radix-tree traversals, incurring substantial CPU overhead that is often comparable to GPU execution time. This paper presents Feather, a prefix-aware scheduler that uses reinforcement learning (RL) to learn the optimal tradeoff between batch size and prefix homogeneity. We also introduce Chunked Hash Tree (CHT), a lightweight data structure that enables fast prefix detection and efficient request selection for the RL scheduler, avoiding expensive tree traversals. We integrate Feather into vLLM and SGLang, and our evaluation shows that Feather achieves 2--10$\times$ higher end-to-end throughput as compared to existing schedulers, while doing no worse than the status quo when the workload does not have enough prefix sharing. Feather achieves these gains by reducing the total number of KV cache accesses, surpassing the performance of prefix-aware attention kernels that have the same goal.