What is goodput for an LLM service, and why is tokens per second a vanity metric?
Raw tokens per second is gameable: crank the batch size and the dashboard looks great while every request misses its latency target. Goodput is the throughput that actually meets your SLOs, and it is the number you size and autoscale on.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real GenAI, LLM, and AI/ML engineering interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Raw tokens per second is gameable: crank the batch size and the dashboard looks great while every request misses its latency target. Goodput is the throughput that actually meets your SLOs, and it is the number you size and autoscale on.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
