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What is disaggregated (prefill/decode) serving for LLM inference?

LLM inference has two phases with opposite resource profiles, and co-locating them makes a long prompt stall everyone else's tokens. The signal is knowing why prefill and decode fight, and what separating them costs. Here is the answer.

Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Applied AI Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.

LLM inference has two phases with opposite resource profiles, and co-locating them makes a long prompt stall everyone else's tokens. The signal is knowing why prefill and decode fight, and what separating them costs. Here is the answer.

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