Request Hedging in Production LLM Serving: Architecture, Tail-Latency Mitigation, and Cancellation Protocols
In distributed computing, tail latency—the 95th, 99th, and 99.9th percentiles—dictates overall user experience, service-level agreements (SLAs), and multi-step agent execution reliability. While median response times (P50) in large language model (LLM) serving often appear acceptable, tail latencies frequently degrade by 4x to 10x. In multi-turn chat applications, real-time voice agents, and multi-agent DAG pipelines, a single straggler request stalls entire execution chains. Request hedging, a
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