LLM Inference Serving Engines in Production: Comparing vLLM, SGLang, TensorRT-LLM, and TGI Architecture, KV Cache Management, Chunked Prefill, and Serving Economics
Serving large language models in production environments requires managing two fundamentally different compute regimes: the compute-bound prefill phase and the memory-bandwidth-bound autoregressive decode phase. Over the past three years, the infrastructure stack for LLM inference has shifted from naive batched execution to specialized serving engines capable of continuous batching, non-contiguous key-value (KV) cache memory management, prefix caching, and compiler-level kernel fusion. Four sys

