Inside vLLM: Anatomy of a High-Throughput LLM Inference System From paged attention, continuous batching, prefix caching, specdec, etc. to multi-GPU, multi-node dynamic serving at scale August 29, 2025 In this post, I'll gradually introduce all of the core system components and advanced features that make up a modern high-throughput LLM inference system. In particular I'll be doing a breakdown of how vLLM [1] works. This post is the first in a series. It starts broad and then layers in detail (following an inverse-pyramid approach) so you can form an accurate high-level mental model of the com