`CpuPlatform.check_and_update_config` ends with a block whose own comment
reads "Lagecy setting":
env_key = "VLLM_CPU_KVCACHE_SPACE"
if env_key in os.environ and os.environ[env_key] != "":
cache_config.kv_cache_memory_bytes = int(os.environ[env_key]) * GiB
It runs unconditionally, so `--kv-cache-memory-bytes` is silently discarded
whenever the env var is set -- which it has to be on CPU, or the engine tries
to claim most of the machine. Two consequences for edge serving: the budget
can only be expressed in whole GiB (parsed with `int()`, so the smallest
non-zero cache is 1 GiB), and vllm-omni's per-stage `kv_cache_memory_bytes`,
which is how the deploy YAMLs express per-stage budgets, has no effect at all
on CPU.
Verified by allocation rather than by memory, because allocation cannot drift:
with the env at 1 GiB, asking for 128 MiB produced the same 17 881 cache
tokens as asking for nothing, and with the env at 4 GiB it produced 71 527 --
the explicit value never applied. After restoring the obvious precedence
(explicit wins, env stays the default for callers that set nothing) the same
request yields 2 231 tokens, the 128 MiB it asked for.
The Qwen3-TTS CPU overlay now sizes stage 0 from the model -- 112 KiB/token,
so 2 seqs at 2048 tokens needs 560 MiB, not 4 GiB. Stage 1 is left alone on
purpose: Code2Wav is a generation stage whose cache is not a plain attention
KV, and under-sizing makes vLLM preempt by recompute, which on a single-stream
edge deployment is a stall.
What this saves in resident memory is deliberately *not* claimed. VmRSS on
this host moves 1.2-2.0 GB between identical runs, because it counts the
mmap'd checkpoint's file pages; an earlier 3.1 GB figure came from a
comparison that changed the model file as well as the budget and does not
stand. RssAnon is the metric to use and that measurement is still in flight.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
