BurstGPT: A Real-world Workload Dataset to Optimize LLM Serving Systems

Serving systems for LLMs are often optimized to improve quality of service (QoS) and throughput. However, due to the lack of open-sourced LLM serving workloads, these systems are frequently evaluated under unrealistic workload assumptions. Consequently, performance may degrade when these systems are deployed in real-world scenarios. This work presents BurstGPT, an LLM serving workload with 5.29 million traces from regional Azure OpenAI GPT services over 121 days. BurstGPT captures realistic LLM serving characteristics through detailed tracing of: (1) Concurrency of requests: It traces burstiness variations of requests in Azure OpenAI GPT services, revealing diversified concurrency patterns in different services and model types. (2) Response Lengths of requests: It traces the auto-regressive serving processes of GPT models, showing statistical relations between requests and their responses. (3) Failures of requests: It traces failures of conversation and API services, showing intensive resource needs and limited resource availability of such services in Azure. Details of the characteristics can serve multiple purposes in LLM serving optimizations, such as system evaluation and trace provisioning. In our demo evaluation with BurstGPT, we observe that frequent variations in BurstGPT reveal declines in efficiency, stability, or reliability in realistic LLM serving. We identify that the generalization of KV cache management and request scheduling optimization is not guaranteed for different workloads, especially when systems are poorly optimized for unrealistic workloads. We have made the dataset publicly available to encourage further research at https://github.com/HPMLL/BurstGPT.