KV Cache Routing#

This document explains how Dynamo’s Key-Value (KV) cache routing optimizes large language model inference by intelligently directing requests to workers with the most relevant cached data, while maintaining load balance through worker utilization metrics.

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

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

When KV blocks are created or removed, the engine notifies the Dynamo router, which then identifies the worker with the best matching blocks and routes traffic accordingly.

To evaluate the benefits of KV-aware routing, compare your workload’s performance using --router-mode random|round-robin against KV-aware routing.

The KV-aware routing arguments:

  • --kv-overlap-score-weight: Controls the importance of prefix cache overlaps in prefill cost calculations. Higher values improve Time To First Token (TTFT) at the cost of Inter-Token Latency (ITL). When set to 0, the router ignores prefix caches and uses pure load balancing. Defaults to 1.

  • --router-temperature: Controls worker selection randomness through softmax sampling of router cost logits. A value of 0 (default) ensures deterministic selection of the lowest-cost worker, while higher values introduce more randomness.

  • --use-kv-events/--no-kv-events: Determines how the router tracks cached blocks. When enabled (default), uses KvIndexer to monitor block creation and deletion events. When disabled, uses ApproxKvIndexer, which estimates cache hits based on a fixed time window (120s). Disable this if your backend doesn’t support KV events.

  • --router-replica-sync: Enables NATS-based state synchronization between router replicas. When enabled, routers share their KV cache distribution and active sequence information, ensuring optimal routing decisions across multiple router instances. This improves fault tolerance and routing accuracy in distributed deployments. Disabled by default.

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.

Serving Two Router Replicas#

For improved fault tolerance, you can launch two frontend + router replicas. Since the frontend and router are currently tied together, you’ll need to use two different HTTP ports for each instance.

To enable state sharing between the router replicas (which provides more accurate routing decisions), use the --router-replica-sync flag when starting the frontend:

# Router replica 1
python -m dynamo.frontend --router-mode kv --port 8000 --router-replica-sync

# Router replica 2
python -m dynamo.frontend --router-mode kv --port 8001 --router-replica-sync

When --router-replica-sync is enabled, the router replicas will communicate with each other via NATS to maintain consistent state across instances. This allows both routers to have a complete view of the KV cache distribution and make optimal routing decisions, even when requests are distributed across multiple router instances.

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|
+---------+          +------------------+           +---------+
                             |
          +------------------+------------------+
          |                  |                  |
          | Cached: 2 blocks | Cached: 5 blocks | Cached: 8 blocks
          | Prefill: 8 blks  | Prefill: 5 blks  | Prefill: 2 blks
          | Decode: 10 blks  | Decode: 5 blks   | Decode: 9 blks
          v                  v                  v
   +----------------+  +----------------+  +----------------+
   |   Worker 1     |  |   Worker 2     |  |   Worker 3     |
   +----------------+  +----------------+  +----------------+

KV Cache reuse introduces complexity to LLM serving load balancing. While it can significantly reduce computation costs, routing strategies that ignore worker-specific KV states can lead to:

  • Missed cache reuse opportunities due to suboptimal worker selection

  • System throughput degradation from uneven request distribution across workers

The router uses a cost function that considers both the prefill cost (influenced by cached blocks) and the decode load to make optimal routing decisions:

Cost Calculation#

  1. Prefill blocks: Calculated by dividing the number of tokens requiring prefill processing by the block size. The system predicts this based on input tokens and available cached blocks per worker, updating the count when the first output token signals prefill completion.

  2. Decode blocks: Estimated from the request’s input tokens and each worker’s active sequences. The count updates when requests complete and their blocks are freed.

  3. Cost formula: cost = overlap_score_weight * prefill_blocks + decode_blocks

    • Lower costs indicate better routing choices

    • overlap_score_weight balances cache hit optimization against load distribution

    • Higher weights favor cache reuse (improving TTFT), while lower weights prioritize even load distribution (improving ITL)

Worker Selection#

The router selects the worker with the lowest cost. When router_temperature is set to a non-zero value, the router uses softmax sampling on the normalized cost logits to introduce randomness in the selection, which can help with load distribution.

Example calculation with overlap_score_weight = 1.0:

  • Worker 1: cost = 1.0 * 8 + 10 = 18

  • Worker 2: cost = 1.0 * 5 + 5 = 10 (selected - lowest cost)

  • Worker 3: cost = 1.0 * 2 + 9 = 11

Events#

Dynamo supports KV Cache Routing across multiple backend implementations through a flexible event system. The KVPublisher component integrates with any framework to emit KV events, while the KVIndexer component maintains a global prefix tree of cached blocks by processing these events from all workers.

+----------------+                         +-----------------+
|                |                         | KV Aware Router |
|     Worker     |                         |                 |
|                | create_kv_block()       | +-------------+ |
| +------------+ | remove_kv_block()       | |  KVIndexer  | |
| |KVPublisher | |------------------------>| +-------------+ |
| +------------+ |                         |                 |
|                |                         |                 |
+----------------+                         +-----------------+

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.

Inter-Router Communication#

In distributed deployments with multiple routers, each router maintains visibility over only a portion of the total requests. To ensure consistent routing decisions, routers synchronize their states through three event types:

  1. AddRequest: Notifies other routers when a request is assigned to a worker. Includes request ID, worker ID, token sequence blocks, and overlap score to track block usage across the system.

  2. MarkPrefillCompleted: Signals when a request moves from prefill to decode phase, allowing routers to update their worker load calculations by excluding completed prefill tokens.

  3. Free: Indicates request completion and resource release, enabling accurate block reference counting across all routers.

Each event carries a unique router ID to prevent self-event processing. This asynchronous communication system ensures optimal routing decisions by maintaining consistent KV cache state across all routers, even as they handle different request streams.

On this page