vllm

name	vllm
description	Use when self-hosting an open-weight LLM for high-throughput concurrent serving with vLLM — running an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, splitting a model across GPUs with tensor or pipeline parallelism, loading quantized weights, serving one or many LoRA adapters, and debugging KV-cache OOM from memory-utilisation and context-length flags. NOT renting or provisioning the GPU box (that is `runpod` or `modal`), NOT single-user laptop inference (that is `ollama`), NOT a hosted inference API you do not operate (that is `together-fireworks` or `huggingface`).
tags	["vllm","llm-serving","inference-server","tensor-parallel","quantization"]
recommends	["open-weights","finetuning","runpod","modal","ollama"]
origin	risco

vLLM — high-throughput serving of open-weight models

vLLM is the inference engine you put in front of an open-weight model when many requests hit it at once. Its job — and this skill's — is throughput under concurrency: keep the GPU busy across dozens of simultaneous requests, not squeeze one prompt out fast. You own the vllm serve flags; the box those flags run on is a runpod/modal concern.

Why not just loop a transformers generate()? Naive serving runs one request at a time and pads every batch to the longest sequence, so the GPU idles. vLLM fixes both:

• PagedAttention stores the KV cache in non-contiguous fixed-size blocks (like OS virtual-memory paging), so there is almost no padding/reservation waste and long contexts pack tightly.
• Continuous batching admits and retires requests token-by-token instead of per-batch, so a new request joins the running batch immediately rather than waiting for the slowest one to finish.

Net effect: an order-of-magnitude more concurrent throughput than single-request serving. If you only ever have one user on a laptop, that machinery is wasted — that is ollama, not this.

Version & setup reality (verify at author time — vLLM ships ~weekly)

• Latest stable is ~0.25.x (July 2026) — releases land roughly weekly. Check PyPI / releases; do not pin to a number you read here.
• The V1 engine is the default since v0.8.0 and recent releases have removed the legacy V0 path, so treat V1 as the only engine. It runs the scheduler + core loop in a separate process and turns on chunked prefill and prefix caching out of the box, so you rarely tune the scheduler by hand (V1 guide, accessed 2026-07). VLLM_USE_V1 historically toggled it — if you see it referenced, it is legacy.
• Install: pip install vllm (default build is CUDA/NVIDIA). ROCm, CPU, TPU and other backends have separate install paths — see the docs' installation matrix. Needs Python + a supported GPU.
• Auth is OFF by default. A bare vllm serve is an open endpoint on 0.0.0.0:8000. To require a bearer token, pass --api-key <KEY> (or set VLLM_API_KEY); clients then send Authorization: Bearer <KEY>. Do not expose an unauthenticated server publicly.

vllm serve → an OpenAI-compatible server

vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3-8B                 # download from HF (or a local path) and serve on :8000
vllm serve /models/qwen3-8b --api-key sk-local-xyz --port 8000 --host 0.0.0.0

The server speaks the OpenAI wire protocol, so any OpenAI client works unchanged — just repoint base_url and use a dummy (or your --api-key) key. Endpoints (online serving docs, accessed 2026-07):

Endpoint	Purpose
POST /v1/chat/completions	chat protocol (messages array) — the usual path
POST /v1/completions	raw text completion (single prompt string)
GET /v1/models	list the served model + any loaded LoRA adapters
POST /v1/embeddings	only for an embedding model (--task embed)
GET /health	liveness — 200 when ready, no auth, no body
GET /metrics	Prometheus metrics (queue depth, throughput, cache usage)

from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(base_url="http://localhost:8000/v1", api_key="sk-local-xyz")  # key = your --api-key
r = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="Qwen/Qwen3-8B",               # the id `/v1/models` reports (or a LoRA adapter name)
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Name three primes."}],
)
print(r.choices[0].message.content)

The model field must match what /v1/models returns — the served model id or a LoRA adapter name (below), not an arbitrary string.

Parallelism: fit the model, then scale out

Two orthogonal knobs. Reach for parallelism only when the model does not fit one GPU — a model that fits should stay on a single GPU (no split), because every split adds communication overhead.

• --tensor-parallel-size N — shard each layer's weights across N GPUs on one node. Use this first: it needs fast intra-node links (NVLink / PCIe) because GPUs sync every layer. N must divide the model's attention-head count. This is how you serve a model too big for one GPU but fitting the node.
• --pipeline-parallel-size M — split the model by layer stages across M nodes. Tolerates slower inter-node network. Use it when the model does not fit even a full node.

Rule of thumb from the docs (parallelism & scaling, accessed 2026-07): set tensor-parallel = GPUs per node, pipeline-parallel = number of nodes.

vllm serve meta-llama/Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct --tensor-parallel-size 4          # 1 node, 4 GPUs
vllm serve <huge-model> --tensor-parallel-size 8 --pipeline-parallel-size 2    # 2 nodes × 8 GPUs

Multi-node needs a Ray cluster wired up first — that orchestration is a runpod/modal concern, not a vLLM flag.

Quantization: smaller weights ≠ automatic speedup

Quantization shrinks the weights so a model fits fewer/smaller GPUs and frees VRAM for KV cache. Select a method with --quantization (often auto-detected from the checkpoint's config). vLLM supports AWQ, GPTQ/GPTQModel, FP8 (W8A8), compressed-tensors (LLM Compressor), INT4/INT8, bitsandbytes and more (quantization docs, accessed 2026-07).

vllm serve TheModel/Qwen3-8B-AWQ --quantization awq
vllm serve neuralmagic/Model-FP8   --quantization compressed-tensors   # FP8 needs Ada/Hopper+

The honest tradeoffs:

• Support is GPU-arch-specific — FP8 W8A8 wants Ada/Hopper-class (or AMD) hardware; a method that is fast on one GPU may be unsupported or emulated on another. Check the compatibility table.
• Quant is a memory win, not a guaranteed throughput win. At low batch / low concurrency the workload is memory-bandwidth-bound and a quant can help; but dequant overhead can cost latency, and at high batch you may be compute-bound where a weight-only quant does little. Benchmark your quant on your hardware at your real concurrency before assuming it is faster.
• Quality drops — usually small for 8-bit/well-calibrated 4-bit, larger for aggressive 4-bit. Serve a quant to save VRAM, not as a free lunch. Picking which quantized checkpoint to pull is an open-weights decision.

LoRA adapters: serve the fine-tuning output

vLLM serves LoRA adapters on top of one loaded base model, so your finetuning/unsloth output goes live without merging or a second server (LoRA docs, accessed 2026-07).

vllm serve meta-llama/Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct \
  --enable-lora \
  --lora-modules sql=/adapters/sql-lora legal=/adapters/legal-lora \
  --max-loras 2 \        # how many adapters resident at once
  --max-lora-rank 16     # must be >= the rank the adapter was trained at

Route to an adapter by naming it in the request model field: "model": "sql" hits the SQL adapter, "model": "meta-llama/Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct" hits the untuned base — same server, no reload.

Load/unload at runtime with VLLM_ALLOW_RUNTIME_LORA_UPDATING=True, then POST /v1/load_lora_adapter / POST /v1/unload_lora_adapter. Base + adapter must match (same family and dims), and --max-lora-rank must be ≥ the trained rank or load fails.

Memory & throughput: where OOM comes from

The two knobs that cause (and cure) most OOM (engine args, accessed 2026-07):

• --gpu-memory-utilization (default ~0.92) — fraction of each GPU vLLM may claim. Weights are loaded, then the rest of this budget becomes the KV-cache pool. Raising it toward 1.0 buys more concurrent sequences but risks OOM from activation/CUDA-graph spikes; lower it if you get OOM at load or under burst.
• --max-model-len — max context (prompt + output) per request; auto-derived from the model config if unset. This is the single biggest OOM lever: KV cache scales with max-model-len × concurrent sequences. A model whose weights fit will still OOM if you leave the full 128K context on and let many long requests batch. Cap --max-model-len to what you actually need.

The mental model: KV_pool = gpu_memory_utilization × VRAM − weights, and concurrent_sequences ≈ KV_pool ÷ (bytes_per_token × context_len). Too-long context or too-high utilization eats the pool. --max-num-seqs and --max-num-batched-tokens cap the batch to trade latency vs throughput. Full KV math + an OOM playbook: references/memory-and-throughput.md.

Self-host health check (no credential needed)

/health requires no API key, so it is the safe first probe on any endpoint you did not just start:

export VLLM_BASE_URL=http://localhost:8000
curl -fsS "$VLLM_BASE_URL/health" && echo "  up"     # 200, empty body when ready
curl -fsS "$VLLM_BASE_URL/v1/models" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${VLLM_API_KEY:-sk-local}"  # confirms WHICH model/adapters are served

/health says "the server is alive"; /v1/models says "and it is serving the model you expect" (plus any LoRA adapters). If --api-key is set, /v1/models needs the bearer header but /health never does. During load a slow first /health is normal — big models take a while to page in.

Honest alternatives — when to prefer another engine

• Text Generation Inference (TGI) — Hugging Face's server; reach for it if you are all-in on the HF ecosystem/tooling and want their supported stack.
• SGLang — competitive throughput with strong RadixAttention prefix-cache reuse; prefer it for heavy shared-prefix workloads (agents, long system prompts, structured generation).
• TensorRT-LLM — squeezes maximum latency/throughput on NVIDIA GPUs via compiled engines, at the cost of a heavier build/ahead-of-time compile step; prefer it when you must wring out every last ms on NVIDIA hardware and can pay the ops complexity.
• Ollama / llama.cpp — single-box / laptop / CPU-or-Metal, one or few users, GGUF quants, zero-ceremony. Prefer it when there is no concurrency to exploit — that is the ollama skill.

Guardrails

• Cap --max-model-len. Leaving the full context window on is the top OOM cause; KV cache scales with context × concurrency (engine args).
• Tune --gpu-memory-utilization for OOM, not throughput first. Lower it if OOM at load/burst; raise it (carefully) for more concurrency. It is a fraction of one GPU's memory.
• A model that fits one GPU should stay on one GPU. Tensor parallelism adds sync overhead — use it to fit, not to speed up an already-fitting model.
• Quant is a VRAM win, not free speed, and its quality cost is real — verify throughput at your concurrency and quality on your task (quantization).
• Never expose an unauthenticated server. No --api-key = open endpoint on 0.0.0.0:8000.
• --max-lora-rank must be ≥ the adapter's trained rank, and base + adapter must match, or the LoRA fails to load.
• This is not a laptop tool. No GPU / one user → ollama. The GPU box + autoscaling → runpod / modal.

Related skills

• open-weights — choose the model/size/license/quant to serve. vLLM runs it; it does not pick it.
• finetuning (and single-GPU unsloth) — produce the LoRA adapter or merged weights that --enable-lora/vllm serve then hosts. They train; vLLM serves.
• runpod — rent/provision the GPU box vLLM runs on (bring-your-own-container GPU rental).
• modal — serverless GPU containers + autoscaling around a vLLM process. The box and scaling, vs vLLM the engine.
• ollama — the single-user / laptop counterpart. No concurrency to exploit → use it, not vLLM.
• Hosted inference you do not operate → together-fireworks / huggingface (you call an API; here you run the server).

Checklist

• Chose vLLM because there is concurrency to exploit (else ollama / a hosted API).
• vllm serve <model> up; /health returns 200 and /v1/models shows the expected model.
• --api-key (or VLLM_API_KEY) set if the endpoint is reachable beyond localhost.
• Parallelism only if the model does not fit one GPU: TP = GPUs/node, PP = nodes.
• --max-model-len capped to real need; --gpu-memory-utilization set with OOM headroom.
• Quant chosen for VRAM fit and benchmarked at real concurrency (not assumed faster).
• LoRA: --max-lora-rank ≥ trained rank; adapter reachable by name via the model field.
• Client points at base_url=<server>/v1; model matches a /v1/models id.

References

• references/flags-and-endpoints.md — the load-bearing vllm serve flags, the full endpoint catalog with example requests, parallelism sizing, and the LoRA runtime API.
• references/memory-and-throughput.md — KV-cache math, the OOM playbook, quantization tradeoffs at different batch sizes, and throughput-tuning knobs.