Speculative decoding promises a big latency win. When does it not deliver, and what does it cost you?

It trades compute for latency, so it wins on an underloaded fleet and can lose on a saturated one. The acceptance rate decides everything, and the acceptance rate depends on traffic you do not control.

Grounded in researched DevOps, SRE and platform engineering interview loops, written to a senior-engineer editorial bar, and never padded to hit a word count.