Characterizing Software Aging in GPU-Based LLM Serving Systems

The paper addresses the problem of software aging in GPU-based LLM serving systems, which differ from traditional CPU-centric systems due to heterogeneous hardware and highly variable workloads. The method involves a 216-hour empirical campaign across six co-located deployments with identical stress, monitoring host, device, and client metrics and applying a statistical pipeline for autocorrelation and multiple testing. Experimental evidence shows statistically significant memory aging in all deployments, with leak rates strongly dependent on the serving runtime and configuration. This matters because it provides a reproducible framework bridging software aging and rejuvenation research with LLM serving, enabling future mitigation strategies.