GORGO: Maximizing KV-Cache Reuse While Minimizing Network Latency in Cross-Region LLM Load Balancing

Abstract: Distributing LLM inference across geographical regions can improve Time-to-First-Token (TTFT) by regionalizing service deployments. While existing multi-region load balancers save prefill computation by prioritizing Key--Value (KV) Cache hit rate, they ignore cluster networking latency, a critical factor in routing decisions. We introduce GORGO, a method for minimizing TTFT by optimizing a total serving cost as a function of available compute, network latency, and prefix caching. Using extensive profiling on custom infrastructure, we analyze component-level latency bottlenecks and benchmark GORGO against three baselines: (1) naive least-load routing, which ignores prefix-cache overlap; (2) prefix-similarity routing, which selectively pushes requests to the replica with the highest cached-prefix overlap; and (3) a centralized HTTP proxy that runs the GORGO policy while tracking requests across all nodes. We demonstrate that GORGO reduces P99 TTFT through network-aware routing and improves average TTFT by preventing pathological cross-region forwarding. Additionally, we find that GORGO-proxy overcomes synchronization overhead in previous methods and is 2.5x faster on median TTFT, demonstrating the success of a centralized router.