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After turning on speculative decoding, p50 latency improved and p99 got worse. Explain it, and decide what to ship.

The speedup formula has two inputs that vary per request and per moment, and the tail lives where both are bad. The answer computes when speculation turns into a slowdown, shows which requests own the p99, and picks a policy instead of an on/off switch.

Updated Oct 2026 · Worked answers on inference mechanisms, with calculations, implementation details, and follow-up questions.

The speedup formula has two inputs that vary per request and per moment, and the tail lives where both are bad. The answer computes when speculation turns into a slowdown, shows which requests own the p99, and picks a policy instead of an on/off switch.

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