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Outcome School · Inference and serving23 min read

by Amit Shekhar · 30 June 2026

How does SGLang work?

How SGLang works. We will also see what problem it solves, how it makes serving large language models faster, and the clever ideas that make it special.

4,516 words#llm#ai#system-design4 recall cards

How does SGLang work?
Read on Outcome School ↗then come back to lock it in
Before you read, guess

How does an LLM generate text?

Ten seconds, a guess, then read — a wrong guess still makes the answer stick.

What this article covers

  1. What is SGLang
  2. A quick recap of how an LLM generates text
  3. The problem SGLang solves
  4. RadixAttention: the heart of SGLang
  5. How RadixAttention reuses past work
  6. The frontend language of SGLang
  7. How the runtime and the frontend work together
  8. Continuous batching in SGLang
  9. Structured output and faster decoding
  10. A simple end-to-end picture
  11. More powerful features of SGLang
  12. How SGLang compares to vLLM

The article lives on outcomeschool.com. Read it there, then come back: the tutor in the margin has read it and will answer questions, and the questions below check what stayed.

Before you go

In one sentence, what was this chapter about?

From memory, without scrolling up. Writing it is what makes it yours; the grade is only to show you what you had.

How sure?