vLLM Simulator

To help with development and testing we have developed a light weight vLLM simulator. It does not truly run inference, but it does emulate responses to the HTTP REST endpoints of vLLM. Currently it supports partial OpenAI-compatible API:

• /v1/chat/completions
• /v1/completions
• /v1/models

In addition, a set of the vLLM HTTP endpoints are suppored as well. These include:

Endpoint	Description
/v1/load_lora_adapter	simulates the dynamic registration of a LoRA adapter
/v1/unload_lora_adapter	simulates the dynamic unloading and unregistration of a LoRA adapter
/metrics	exposes Prometheus metrics. See the table below for details
/health	standard health check endpoint
/ready	standard readiness endpoint

In addition, it supports a subset of vLLM's Prometheus metrics. These metrics are exposed via the /metrics HTTP REST endpoint. Currently supported are the following metrics:

Metric	Description
vllm:gpu_cache_usage_perc	The fraction of KV-cache blocks currently in use (from 0 to 1). Currently this value will always be zero.
vllm:lora_requests_info	Running stats on LoRA requests
vllm:num_requests_running	Number of requests currently running on GPU
vllm:num_requests_waiting	Prometheus metric for the number of queued requests

The simulated inference has no connection with the model and LoRA adapters specified in the command line parameters or via the /v1/load_lora_adapter HTTP REST endpoint. The /v1/models endpoint returns simulated results based on those same command line parameters and those loaded via the /v1/load_lora_adapter HTTP REST endpoint.

The simulator supports two modes of operation:

• echo mode: the response contains the same text that was received in the request. For /v1/chat/completions the last message for the role=user is used.
• random mode: the response is randomly chosen from a set of pre-defined sentences.

Timing of the response is defined by two parameters: time-to-first-token and inter-token-latency.

For a request with stream=true: time-to-first-token defines the delay before the first token is returned, inter-token-latency defines the delay between subsequent tokens in the stream.

For a requst with stream=false: the response is returned after delay of <time-to-first-token> + (<inter-token-latency> * (<number_of_output_tokens> - 1))

It can be run standalone or in a Pod for testing under packages such as Kind.

Limitations

API responses contains a subset of the fields provided by the OpenAI API.

Click to show the structure of requests/responses

• /v1/chat/completions
  • request
    • stream
    • model
    • messages
      • role
      • content
  • response
    • id
    • created
    • model
    • choices
      • index
      • finish_reason
      • message
• /v1/completions
  • request
    • stream
    • model
    • prompt
    • max_tokens (for future usage)
  • response
    • id
    • created
    • model
    • choices
      • text
• /v1/models
  • response
    • object (list)
    • data
      • id
      • object (model)
      • created
      • owned_by
      • root
      • parent

For more details see the vLLM documentation

Command line parameters

• config: the path to a yaml configuration file
• port: the port the simulator listents on, default is 8000
• model: the currently 'loaded' model, mandatory
• served-model-name: model names exposed by the API (a list of space-separated strings)
• lora-modules: a list of LoRA adapters (a list of space-separated JSON strings): '{"name": "name", "path": "lora_path", "base_model_name": "id"}', optional, empty by default
• max-loras: maximum number of LoRAs in a single batch, optional, default is one
• max-cpu-loras: maximum number of LoRAs to store in CPU memory, optional, must be >= than max-loras, default is max-loras
• max-model-len: model's context window, maximum number of tokens in a single request including input and output, optional, default is 1024
• max-num-seqs: maximum number of sequences per iteration (maximum number of inference requests that could be processed at the same time), default is 5
• mode: the simulator mode, optional, by default random
  • echo: returns the same text that was sent in the request
  • random: returns a sentence chosen at random from a set of pre-defined sentences
• time-to-first-token: the time to the first token (in milliseconds), optional, by default zero
• inter-token-latency: the time to 'generate' each additional token (in milliseconds), optional, by default zero
• seed: random seed for operations (if not set, current Unix time in nanoseconds is used)

In addition, as we are using klog, the following parameters are available:

• add_dir_header: if true, adds the file directory to the header of the log messages
• alsologtostderr: log to standard error as well as files (no effect when -logtostderr=true)
• log_backtrace_at: when logging hits line file:N, emit a stack trace (default :0)
• log_dir: if non-empty, write log files in this directory (no effect when -logtostderr=true)
• log_file: if non-empty, use this log file (no effect when -logtostderr=true)
• log_file_max_size: defines the maximum size a log file can grow to (no effect when -logtostderr=true). Unit is megabytes. If the value is 0, the maximum file size is unlimited. (default 1800)
• logtostderr: log to standard error instead of files (default true)
• one_output: if true, only write logs to their native severity level (vs also writing to each lower severity level; no effect when -logtostderr=true)
• skip_headers: if true, avoid header prefixes in the log messages
• skip_log_headers: if true, avoid headers when opening log files (no effect when -logtostderr=true)
• stderrthreshold: logs at or above this threshold go to stderr when writing to files and stderr (no effect when -logtostderr=true or -alsologtostderr=true) (default 2)
• v: number for the log level verbosity
• vmodule: comma-separated list of pattern=N settings for file-filtered logging

---

Migrating from releases prior to v0.2.0

• max-running-requests was replaced by max-num-seqs
• lora was replaced by lora-modules, which is now a list of JSON strings, e.g, '{"name": "name", "path": "lora_path", "base_model_name": "id"}'

Working with docker image

Building

To build a Docker image of the vLLM Simulator, run:

make image-build

Please note that the default image tag is ghcr.io/llm-d/llm-d-inference-sim:dev.
The following environment variables can be used to change the image tag: REGISTRY, SIM_TAG, IMAGE_TAG_BASE or IMG.

Running

To run the vLLM Simulator image under Docker, run:

docker run --rm --publish 8000:8000 ghcr.io/llm-d/llm-d-inference-sim:dev  --port 8000 --model "Qwen/Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct" --lora "tweet-summary-0,tweet-summary-1"

Note: To run the vLLM Simulator with the latest release version, in the above docker command replace dev with the current release which can be found on GitHub.

Note: The above command exposes the simulator on port 8000, and serves the Qwen/Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct model.

Standalone testing

Building

To build the vLLM simulator to run locally as an executable, run:

make build

Running

To run the vLLM simulator in a standalone test environment, run:

./bin/llm-d-inference-sim --model my_model --port 8000

Kubernetes testing

To run the vLLM simulator in a Kubernetes cluster, run:

kubectl apply -f manifests/deployment.yaml

To verify the deployment is available, run:

kubectl get deployment vllm-llama3-8b-instruct