Prompt Caching Across Cloud LLM Providers: Architecture, TTL Lifecycles, and Economic Break-Even for Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, and DeepSeek
The primary latency and computational bottleneck in large language model inference is the prefill phase. When an application submits a request containing thousands of tokens of static system instructions, OpenAPI tool schemas, few-shot demonstrations, and retrieved document context, the inference server must process all input tokens through every transformer layer before generating the first output token. In high-concurrency production environments, repeating this full forward pass across identi
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