ORBITFLOW: SLO-Aware Long-Context LLM Serving with Fine-Grained KV Cache Reconfiguration

Abstract: Serving long-context LLMs is challenging because request lengths and batch composition vary during token generation, causing the memory footprint to fluctuate significantly at runtime. Offloading KV caches to host memory limits effective memory usage, but existing static and predetermined offloading strategies cannot adapt to the rapidly shifting memory demands of long-context serving. This often leads to excessive CPU-to-GPU KV transfers that translate into latency spikes and frequent SLO violations. To address these challenges, we introduce ORBITFLOW, a fine-grained and adaptive KV cache management system that meets latency SLOs in long-context LLM serving. ORBITFLOW employs a lightweight ILP solver to decide which layers' KV caches to retain on the GPU for each request, within memory capacity constraints. It continuously refines KV placements based on runtime feedback when the active plan becomes suboptimal during token generation. Under heavy load, ORBITFLOW invokes a fallback mechanism to temporarily defer in-flight requests with large memory footprints, preserving overall SLO attainment. Our experiments demonstrate that ORBITFLOW improves SLO attainment for TPOT and TBT by up to 66% and 48%, respectively, while reducing the 95th percentile latency by 38% and achieving up to 3.3x higher throughput compared to existing offloading methods.