docs(LLM): the decode stall a prefill causes, and the knobs that turn it #27

Merged
dank merged 2 commits from docs/radiance-prefill-decode-census into main 2026-10-19 14:21:45 -07:00
2 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
Frank e133d2412d Merge origin/main into docs/radiance-prefill-decode-census
Two conflicts, both from the 2026-10-19 vault compaction on main:

* frontmatter description — main shortened it to satisfy OKF DESC
  (max 120 chars); this branch's longer wording would have failed the
  seam. Kept main's shape and folded the new §9 in by naming
  step-shape attribution instead of profiler attribution.
* the Related bullet for [[vLLM Porting and Compile Triage]] — that
  page was destroyed on main, so the link is dropped rather than
  resurrected; this branch's [[frank-archon]] row is kept.

Index rows regenerated with scripts/gen-vault-index.py.
2026-10-19 14:20:05 -07:00
Frank e3a02e25c7 docs(LLM): census the decode stall a prefill causes, and the knobs that turn it
Live step-shape census on frank-archon (radiance 1.0.13, boot of 2026-10-15):
decode-only steps run 18.7 ms, prefill+mixed steps 317 ms — 60 % of engine
wall-clock inside 8 % of the steps — and a day of Prometheus shows decode at
13.3 t/s median while prefill runs >=1000 t/s against 106-240 t/s when it does
not. The lag test says the penalty is confined to the prefill window: no
lingering expert-residency tail, and preemptions are zero.

Adds the method as LLM Performance Diagnosis S9 (counter arithmetic, the lagged
bucket correlation that separates step contention from residency churn, and the
four radiance knobs with their published costs), and the endpoint's own numbers
plus the verdict as two frank-archon laws: --busy-prefill-chunk and
--prefill-interleave are absent from this pin (proven via the running
container's --help), so MNBT is the only crank here and an image bump is gated
by the 1.2.0 numerics dead end.

No behavior change; docs only.
2026-10-19 04:11:20 -07:00