The original budget dropped experts blindly — even cached ones that cost
zero disk I/O. The miss-aware version pre-scans pin/ecache residency
before applying the budget:
- ALL cache hits are kept (free to compute, no disk I/O)
- Only misses compete for the remaining budget slots
- Miss budget = EXPERT_BUDGET - nhits (min 0)
Results (budget=4, same prompt/config as before):
Original Miss-aware
tok/s 0.33 0.36 (+9%)
hit rate 16.4% 38.2% (2.3x)
prefill 8.9s 5.6s (1.6x faster)
decode 97.4s 88.9s (9% faster)
The hit rate doubling is the key quality signal: the model now gets the
full contribution from all resident experts plus the top-4 new loads,
instead of losing some hits to the budget.
woolcoxm
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