Scorpio: Serving Right Requests at the Right Time for Heterogeneous SLOs in LLM Inference

Abstract

Large Language Model (LLM) serving increasingly underpins online Web services such as conversational agents, Web search, and programming assistants, where requests carry heterogeneous Service Level Objectives (SLOs) such as Time to First Token (TTFT) and Time Per Output Token (TPOT). Existing LLM serving systems prioritize maximum throughput and treat all requests uniformly, which leads to suboptimal SLO attainment. This paper introduces Scorpio, an SLO-oriented LLM serving system designed to maximize system goodput and SLO attainment for workloads with heterogeneous SLOs. Our core insight is to exploit SLO heterogeneity for adaptive scheduling across admission control, queue management, and batch selection. Scorpio features a TTFT Guard, which employs least-deadline-first reordering and rejects unattainable requests, and a TPOT Guard, which utilizes a VBS-based admission control and a novel credit-based batching mechanism. Both guards are supported by a predictive module. Evaluations demonstrate that Scorpio improves system goodput by up to 14.4x and SLO adherence by up to 46.5% under high load compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

Accepted at WISE 2026 (27th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering), Special Track on Innovative Web Technologies. 15 pages. This version has been accepted for publication after peer review but is not the Version of Record; the Version of Record will appear in the Springer LNCS proceedings