serving-llms-vllm

vLLM - High-Performance LLM Serving

When to use

Use when deploying production LLM APIs, optimizing inference latency/throughput, or serving models with limited GPU memory. Supports OpenAI-compatible endpoints, quantization (GPTQ/AWQ/FP8), and tensor parallelism.

Quick start

vLLM achieves 24x higher throughput than standard transformers through PagedAttention (block-based KV cache) and continuous batching (mixing prefill/decode requests).

Installation:

pip install vllm

Basic offline inference:

from vllm import LLM, SamplingParams

llm = LLM(model="meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct")
sampling = SamplingParams(temperature=0.7, max_tokens=256)

outputs = llm.generate(["Explain quantum computing"], sampling)
print(outputs[0].outputs[0].text)

OpenAI-compatible server:

vllm serve meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct

# Query with OpenAI SDK
python -c "
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(base_url='http://localhost:8000/v1', api_key='EMPTY')
print(client.chat.completions.create(
    model='meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct',
    messages=[{'role': 'user', 'content': 'Hello!'}]
).choices[0].message.content)
"

Common workflows

Workflow 1: Production API deployment

Copy this checklist and track progress:

Deployment Progress:
- [ ] Step 1: Configure server settings
- [ ] Step 2: Test with limited traffic
- [ ] Step 3: Enable monitoring
- [ ] Step 4: Deploy to production
- [ ] Step 5: Verify performance metrics

Step 1: Configure server settings

Choose configuration based on your model size:

# For 7B-13B models on single GPU
vllm serve meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct \
  --gpu-memory-utilization 0.9 \
  --max-model-len 8192 \
  --port 8000

# For 30B-70B models with tensor parallelism
vllm serve meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3-70B-Instruct \
  --tensor-parallel-size 4 \
  --gpu-memory-utilization 0.9 \
  --quantization awq \
  --port 8000

# For production with caching (Prometheus metrics are exposed
# automatically at /metrics on the API port)
vllm serve meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct \
  --gpu-memory-utilization 0.9 \
  --enable-prefix-caching \
  --port 8000 \
  --host 0.0.0.0