KV Cache Routing#

This documentation explains how Key-Value (KV) cache routing works in Dynamo, providing optimized inference for large language models by intelligently directing requests to workers with the most relevant cached data while simultaneously load balancing based on utilization metrics sent by the workers.

To enable KV cache aware routing start the frontend node like this:

python -m dynamo.frontend --router-mode kv

The engine announces when a KV block is created or removed. The Dynamo router run finds the worker with the best match for those KV blocks and directs the traffic to that node.

For performance testing, compare a typical workload with --router-mode random|round-robin to see if it can benefit from KV-aware routing.

The KV-aware routing arguments:

  • --kv-overlap-score-weight: Sets the amount of weighting on overlaps with prefix caches, which directly contributes to the prefill cost. A large weight is expected to yield a better TTFT (at the expense of worse ITL). When set to 0, prefix caches are not considered at all (falling back to pure load balancing behavior on the active blocks).

  • --router-temperature: Sets the temperature when randomly selecting workers to route to via softmax sampling on the router cost logits. Setting it to 0 recovers the deterministic behavior where the min logit is picked.

  • --kv-events: Sets whether to listen to KV events for maintaining the global view of cached blocks. If true, then we use the KvIndexer to listen to the block creation and deletion events. If false, ApproxKvIndexer, which assumes the kv cache of historical prompts exists for fixed time durations (hard-coded to 120s), is used to predict the kv cache hit ratio in each engine. Set false if your backend engine does not emit KV events.

Architecture#

Colloquially, we refer to a Dynamo component that serves an endpoint for LLM inference as a worker.

Basic Routing#

Dynamo supports several routing strategies when sending requests from one component to another component’s endpoint.

First, we must create a client tied to a components endpoint, we can do this using the labels defined above. Here we are getting a client tied to the generate endpoint of the VllmWorker component.

client = namespace('dynamo').component('VllmWorker').endpoint('generate').client()

We can then use the default routing methods exposed by the client class to send requests to the VllmWorker component.

  • Random routing: Default strategy, available via client.generate() or client.random()

  • Round-robin routing: Cycles through available workers via client.round_robin()

  • Direct routing: Explicitly targets a specific worker via client.direct(input, component_id)

KV Cache routing uses direct routing with a special worker selection algorithm.

Understanding KV Cache#

The leading Large Language Models (LLMs) today are auto-regressive and based off of the transformer architecture. One key inference optimization technique is to cache the already computed keys and values and to reuse them for the future tokens. This is called the KV Cache.

KV Cache Optimizations#

Every inference framework will have a KV Cache for each worker. A popular inference framework library is vLLM where a key contribution was PagedAttention, which allowed them to manage KV Cache in an efficient way by chunking requests into blocks.

Another popular inference framework, SGLang, contributed RadixAttention which introduced a prefix tree which allows for efficient matching, inserting and eviction of KV Cache blocks. The prefix tree structure popularized KV Cache reuse.

In Dynamo, we introduce a KVPublisher which emits KV Cache events that occur at each worker and a KVIndexer which keeps track of these events globally.

To get a feel for how KV Cache management works on a single worker with KV Cache reuse turned on and where the KVPublisher gets plugged in, we can walk through the KV Block management flow:

  1. Request tokenization: The incoming prompt is converted into tokens

  2. Block partitioning: The token sequence is divided into fixed-size blocks (e.g., 16 or 64 tokens per block)

  3. Block hashing: Each block of tokens is hashed to create a unique identifier

  4. Cache lookup:

    • For each block, the system checks if a matching block already exists in the KV cache

    • If a match is found, the existing KV cache block is reused

    • If no match is found, the system proceeds to the next step

  5. Resource allocation:

    • For blocks without matches, the system attempts to allocate new memory space

    • If sufficient memory is available, allocate memory space and proceed to step 7

    • If memory is constrained, proceed to step 6

  6. Cache eviction (when necessary):

    • The system applies an eviction policy (e.g., LRU, LFU) to identify blocks for removal

    • Selected blocks are evicted from the cache

    • KVPublisher emits a KV removed event notifying KVIndexer about the removed block.

    • Alternatively, some systems may offload less-frequently used blocks to CPU memory.

  7. KV computation:

    • For new blocks, the model computes key and value tensors

    • These tensors are stored in the newly allocated cache blocks

    • KVPublisher emits a kv stored event notifying KVIndexer about newly stored blocks.

Further details can be found for: TRT-LLM, vLLM and SGLang.

KV Cache Routing and Load Balancing#

+---------+          +------------------+           +---------+
|  Tokens |--------->| KV Aware Router  |---------> | Worker 2|
+---------+          +------------------+           +---------+
                             |
          +------------------+------------------+
          |                  |                  |
          | KV match: 15%    | KV match: 50%    | KV match: 75%
          v                  v                  v
   +----------------+  +----------------+  +----------------+
   |   Worker 1     |  |   Worker 2     |  |   Worker 3     |
   |  (Load: 30%)   |  |  (Load: 50%)   |  |  (Load: 80%)   |
   +----------------+  +----------------+  +----------------+

Load balancing in LLM serving becomes complex when enabling KV Cache reuse. While KV Cache reuse can save significant computation, if the routing strategy is not aware of the unique KV states of each worker we can:

  • miss opportunities for KV Cache reuse if routing to the “wrong” node

  • get into an imbalanced state where a few workers are processing many requests, lowering throughput of entire system

The best way to solve these issues is for the router to have a global view of KV Cache and load. With this view, the router can use a cost function to score the workers and make decisions to maximize cache hits while keeping the system balanced and throughput high.

In the above image, our cost function is (KV match - Load) so we select Worker 2 even though Worker 3 would offer the best KV match.

  • Worker 1 = (0.15 - 0.30) = -0.15

  • Worker 2 = (0.50 - 0.50) = 0

  • Worker 3 = (0.75 - 0.80) = -0.05

Events#

In Dynamo, we want to support KV Cache Routing and load balancing for many backends that have different implementations of KV Cache and record different metrics. To that end, we built a KVPublisher that can be plugged into any framework to publish KV Events and a WorkerMetricsPublisher that can publish Metric Events.

On the receiving side we have a KVIndexer which accepts events from the KVPublisher and puts them into a global prefix tree and a KvMetricsAggregator which aggregates metric events by worker.

+----------------+                         +-----------------+
|                |                         | KV Aware Router |
|     Worker     |                         |                 |
|                | create_kv_block()       | +-------------+ |
| +------------+ | remove_kv_block()       | |  KVIndexer  | |
| |KVPublisher | |------------------------>| +-------------+ |
| +------------+ |                         |                 |
|                | num_request_waiting     | +--------------+|
| +------------+ | gpu_cache_usage_perc    | |KvMetricsAggre||
| |KvMetrics   | |------------------------>| |    gator     ||
| |Publisher   | |        ...              | +--------------+|
| +------------+ |                         +-----------------+
+----------------+

KVPublisher#

The KVPublisher can be initialized and then called in the inference framework where blocks are allocated and removed.

The two types of events are:

  • KV stored event

  • KV removed event

The publisher can be initialized and used through C bindings or Python bindings.

KVIndexer#

The KVIndexer builds and maintains a global view of cached blocks in a prefix tree. We modify the original prefix tree by also storing the worker id on each node. This is so we can return the number of matched blocks for each worker.

The KVIndexer has a method find_matches_for_request, which takes in tokens and returns a dictionary with keys of worker id and values of the number of matched KV Blocks.

WorkerMetricsPublisher#

We added a KvMetrics Publisher which sends the following metrics to the KvMetricsAggregator:

  • num_requests_waiting

  • gpu_cache_usage_perc

  • gpu_prefix_cache_hit_rate

  • request_active_slots

  • request_total_slots

  • kv_active_blocks

  • kv_total_blocks

Currently, the WorkerMetricsPublisher exists as a Python binding.

KvMetricsAggregator#

The KvMetricsAggregator receives these metrics and aggregates them. It has a method get_metrics which returns an object of AggregatedMetrics.

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