LLM Tokenizer Preprocessing Pool in Production: Avoiding GPU Starvation with Async Tokenizer Pools, Length-Aware Queues, and CPU Affinity
The bottleneck in LLM serving isn't always the GPU. This article explains how to decouple the tokenizer preprocessing pool using async batch encoding, length-aware queues, CPU affinity, and backpressure metrics to prevent long prompts from blocking requests and keep the GPU fed with executable batches.