Which 8B LLM Should You Self-Host?

Real latency and throughput data from production-grade benchmarks on a single GPU. Pick your workload, set your traffic, get a clear answer.

NVIDIA A10 · 24 GB 3 models · 8B params · FP16 GuideLLM concurrent sweep 4 → 256 concurrency

What are you building?

Different workloads stress different parts of the model. Pick yours to see which model fits best.

How much traffic do you need to handle?

Drag the slider to your expected concurrent users. Cards show each model's predicted performance at that load.

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Performance under load

Every point is a measured value. Latency lines break at levels where error rates exceeded 50% — those points are excluded as misleading. Throughput lines span the full range.

Time to First Token — p95 ?

The moment text starts streaming. Knee = where latency spikes.

End-to-End Latency — p95 ?

Full round-trip. Matters for non-streaming API calls.

Throughput — output tok/s ?

Total generation rate across all users. Higher = more efficient.

TPOT — Time Per Output Token ?

How fast text streams once it starts. Lower = smoother UX.

Head-to-head numbers

One row per concurrency level. Best value per row highlighted. Error % = real HTTP failures. Incomplete % = streaming when window closed (not failures). Cells showing — had >50% errors — latency values excluded as misleading.

What the data says

Auto-generated for the selected workload. Updates when you change anything above.

Data notes & caveats

How this was measured

Load generator

GuideLLM concurrent sweep — holds exactly N requests in-flight at all times, stepping through 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256. Each level runs for 90 seconds with 30 s cooldown between levels.

Request format

Standard OpenAI-compatible /v1/chat/completions with SSE streaming. Each prompt is unique (random synthetic text) to defeat vLLM's automatic prefix caching.

Infrastructure

All models run on a single NVIDIA A10 (24 GB) via vLLM with FP16 precision. Same GPU, same serving framework, same benchmark harness — apples-to-apples.

Metrics collection

TTFT measured from request send to first SSE token arrival (network included). E2E from request send to final token. TPOT = inter-token gap at decode. All percentiles computed across all requests in the level.