TurboServe: Serving Streaming Video Generation Efficiently and Economically
arXiv · HuggingFace · ▲30
Abstract (verbatim)
Streaming video generation is emerging as a new serving workload in which users interact with long-lived sessions that generate video progressively, chunk by chunk. Unlike offline video generation or typical LLM serving, streaming video generation must preserve session state across active and idle periods, repeatedly schedule ongoing sessions, and deliver each chunk under a tight latency target. This creates two key serving challenges in multi-user, multi-GPU environments: session duration heterogeneity, where long-running sessions make placement decisions suboptimal over time, and temporal user-demand heterogeneity, where the number of active sessions fluctuates sharply across bursts and idle periods. We present TurboServe, the first serving system designed specifically for streaming video generation workloads. TurboServe formulates serving as an online scheduling problem that jointly coordinates session placement and GPU provisioning. Its closed-loop scheduling algorithm combines a migration-aware placement controller, which rebalances sessions across GPUs to reduce the maximum per-chunk latency, with a load-driven autoscaling controller, which adapts the GPU budget to workload variation for improved cost efficiency. To support these decisions at runtime, TurboServe implements coalesced chunk processing for batching concurrent active sessions on the same GPU, GPU-CPU offloading for session suspension and resumption, and NCCL-based GPU-GPU migration for online rebalancing. We evaluate TurboServe on real-world production traces from Shengshu Technology across multiple model sizes and GPU clusters with up to 64 NVIDIA B300 GPUs. Compared with baseline serving configurations, TurboServe reduces worst-case per-chunk latency by 37.5% and total GPU operating cost by 37.2% on average. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/shengshu-ai/TurboServe.
Background
Background Analysis
1. Technical Context
With the advancement of video generation models (e.g., Sora, Veo), streaming video generation has emerged as a new paradigm in generative AI services. This technology allows users to progressively generate video chunks (e.g., frame-by-frame or second-by-second) and adjust content in real time (e.g., modifying scenes or characters). The core requirement is low-latency interactive generation—users expect to see video output as it is being created, rather than waiting for the entire video. Typical applications include film production (real-time special effects preview), advertising (dynamic creative adjustments), or educational content creation (instant feedback on teaching videos). However, traditional video generation systems (e.g., Sora) use an "offline batch generation" mode, which cannot support such long-term interactive scenarios, necessitating specialized streaming platforms.
2. Previous Limitations
Existing systems face two major challenges:
- Session Duration Heterogeneity: Sessions vary drastically in duration (from seconds to hours). Traditional systems treat all sessions as "short tasks," leading to long sessions monopolizing resources and blocking new users.
- Temporal Demand Fluctuations: User activity is bursty (e.g., high demand during peak hours, low demand during off-peak hours). Static resource allocation either wastes GPUs (during low demand) or causes latency spikes (during high demand) due to insufficient resources.
Previous methods failed to optimize for "persistent session states" and "dynamic loads," resulting in increased latency and cost inefficiency.
3. Proposed Solution
TurboServe addresses these issues by jointly scheduling session placement and GPU resource allocation:
- Dynamic Session Migration: Uses NCCL (high-speed GPU communication) to migrate sessions between GPUs, preventing long sessions from blocking resources.
- Elastic Resource Allocation: Automatically scales GPU counts based on real-time load (e.g., adding GPUs during peak hours to reduce latency, releasing them during off-peak hours to save costs).
- Batching and Suspension Mechanisms: Merges computations of multiple active sessions (batching) to improve GPU utilization and allows idle sessions to temporarily move to CPU memory to free up GPU resources.
4. Unique Approach
Unlike existing systems, TurboServe is the first system explicitly designed for streaming video generation, with a key innovation in treating "session management" and "resource scheduling" as a unified problem. Traditional methods (e.g., vLLM-Omni or TridentServe) only optimize single requests, while TurboServe balances latency and cost through a closed-loop algorithm. For example:
- Migration-Aware Scheduling: Dynamically adjusts session locations to minimize worst-case latency.
- Load-Driven Scaling: Adjusts GPU counts based on real-time demand, rather than static configurations.
Experiments show TurboServe achieves 37.5% lower worst-case chunk latency and 37.2% lower GPU operating costs on average compared to baselines.




