Llm Gateway Cost And Caching medium
A multi-tenant B2B support assistant answers questions using each customer's private knowledge base. To raise the semantic cache hit rate from 22% to 35%, an engineer proposes one shared cache across all tenants. What is the main problem?
- A Answers built from one tenant's private documents can be served to another tenant; partition the cache by tenant ID.
- B Embedding similarity scores drift across tenants, so a shared index must be rebuilt nightly to keep the threshold calibrated.
- C A shared cache is safe because embeddings are one-way, so no tenant's raw text can be recovered from a cached vector entry.
- D The higher hit rate will invalidate the provider's prompt cache, raising input token cost more than the semantic cache saves.
Answer: A. Answers built from one tenant's private documents can be served to another tenant; partition the cache by tenant ID.
A semantic cache returns a **stored answer**, not just a vector, so a near-match from another tenant leaks that tenant's private content. The tradeoff is a lower hit rate in exchange for a hard tenant boundary on the cache key. Option C is tempting but irrelevant: the leak is the cached response text, not the embedding. Sharing across tenants is only acceptable for answers built purely from public, tenant-agnostic content.
One system design question a day, with spaced repetition so the ones you miss come back.
Get the appRelated questions
- Your primary LLM provider is fully down for an hour, and no tested fallback exists for your agent feature. The product also has an FAQ answer feature backed by a semantic cache. What is the best degradation mode?
- Your gateway applies one 5-second timeout to all LLM calls. Classification calls work fine, but long streamed answers are frequently cut off. What is the best fix?
- During a provider brownout returning 429 and 503 errors, the client SDK retries 3 times and the gateway also retries 3 times, both immediately. Provider load spikes, and the bill grows from partially streamed responses. What should you change?
- Finance asks for LLM spend broken down by tenant and by product feature. Today the gateway only sees the total on the provider's monthly invoice. What should you do?
- A retail assistant uses a semantic cache. Weeks after a store changed its holiday hours, users still receive the old hours from cached answers. What is the right fix?
- A feature sends 1,500 input tokens and receives 600 output tokens per request. Output tokens cost about 5x input tokens. Which single change cuts cost the most?