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kv-router: skip partial-prefix BlockStored events instead of exiting - #38

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Thachnh wants to merge 3 commits into
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v41-partial-skip
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Thachnh wants to merge 3 commits into
prod-kv-indexersfrom
v41-partial-skip

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@Thachnh

@Thachnh Thachnh commented Sep 10, 2026

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Problem

vLLM (from the DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash day-0 image, vllm/vllm-openai:deepseekv41-flash-0909) hashes prefixes every prefix_match_unit (hash_block_size, 32 for V4.1) tokens, which is finer than the cache block size (128). It publishes the prompt tail that ends inside a cache block as a BlockStored on the main MLA group whose block_size is the sub-block length (32/64/96).

The standalone indexer treats any main-attention block-size mismatch as a fatal --block-size misconfiguration and calls std::process::exit(1), so all three kv-indexer:* flavors for deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash crash-looped (engine block size 32 != configured --block-size 128). No indexer --block-size works: 128 dies on the partial events, 32 dies on the whole-block events.

Observed event mix on a V4.1 pod (150 s tap): groups 0-3 sliding_window_mla @32 (already filtered as non-main), group 4 mla_attention @128 (whole blocks) plus @32 partial entries.

Fix

convert_event: when block_size < kv_block_size treat the event as a partial-prefix entry and drop it (rate-limited warn) instead of erroring. A larger event block size stays fatal (that can only be a misconfig). Whole-block routing information is unaffected; only sub-block tail entries are ignored.

Unit test added; cargo test --lib zmq_wire::tests = 19 passed.

Same commit cherry-picked onto 24h-indexer as v41-partial-skip-h24 for the h24 image.

Refs DEE-640.

vLLM (>= the DeepSeek-V4.1 day-0 image) hashes prefixes every
prefix_match_unit (hash_block_size) tokens, which can be finer than the
cache block size, and publishes the prompt tail that ends inside a cache
block as a BlockStored whose block_size is the sub-block length (32/64/96
for a 128-token block). The standalone indexer treated any block_size
mismatch on a main-attention event as a fatal --block-size misconfig and
exited, so every V4.1 indexer crash-looped.

Treat a proper divisor of the configured block size as a partial-prefix
entry: drop it (rate-limited warn). Non-divisor mismatches stay fatal.
@Thachnh
Thachnh deployed to external_collaborator September 10, 2026 17:37 — with GitHub Actions Active
Shang-Pin and others added 2 commits September 16, 2026 23:24
…ered pod

Pod discovery registered each engine pod once, as dp_rank 0 on
tcp://<ip>:<zmq_port>. vLLM offsets the KV-event ZMQ port and the
/kv_recover port by data_parallel_rank, so on a --data-parallel-size N
engine ranks 1..N-1 publish to ports nobody subscribes to and everything
they cache is invisible to /query while the engine still hits it.

Measured on deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash (DP=2): every prefill the
scheduler placed on rank 1 (about half) showed 0 in the standalone
indexer and in rank 0's /kv_recover dump, and all its blocks in rank 1's
dump; the KV ladder read actual 0.78 > h24 0.65 > perfect 0.63 >
reality 0.59.

Add --watch-dp-size (default 1, so single-rank engines are unchanged).
The watcher registers one listener per rank under the pod's instance:
dp_rank r, tcp://<ip>:<zmq_port + r>, http://<ip>:<recover_port + r>.
register() rejects a rank that is already present, so a pod whose
registration fails part-way is deregistered before the retry instead of
being left half-subscribed forever.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
standalone-indexer: subscribe to every data-parallel rank of a discovered pod
@Shang-Pin
Shang-Pin had a problem deploying to external_collaborator September 17, 2026 21:15 — with GitHub Actions Failure
@github-actions github-actions Bot added the documentation Improvements or additions to documentation label Sep 17, 2026
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2 participants