AIPerf

AIPerf is a comprehensive benchmarking tool that measures the performance of generative AI models served by your preferred inference solution. It provides detailed metrics using a command line display as well as extensive benchmark performance reports.

Quick Start

This quick start guide leverages Ollama via Docker Desktop.

Setting up a Local Server

In order to set up an Ollama server, run granite4:350m using the following commands:

docker run -d \
  --name ollama \
  -p 11434:11434 \
  -v ollama-data:/root/.ollama \
  ollama/ollama:latest
docker exec -it ollama ollama pull granite4:350m

Basic Usage

Create a virtual environment and install AIPerf:

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install aiperf

[!NOTE] On Linux aarch64 (arm64), one of AIPerf's dependencies (crick) ships only an sdist and needs a C compiler at install time. Install the system build toolchain before pip install aiperf — sudo apt install build-essential (Debian/Ubuntu), sudo yum groupinstall "Development Tools" (RHEL/CentOS), or equivalent. Linux x86_64, macOS, and Windows install from pre-built wheels and need no toolchain.

Optional integrations:

• pip install "aiperf[mlflow]" enables MLflow uploads and live telemetry streaming
• pip install "aiperf[otel]" enables OpenTelemetry metric streaming
• pip install "aiperf[wandb]" enables Weights & Biases result uploads
• pip install "aiperf[mlflow,otel,wandb]" installs all telemetry extras

To run a simple benchmark against your Ollama server:

aiperf profile \
  --model "granite4:350m" \
  --streaming \
  --endpoint-type chat \
  --tokenizer ibm-granite/granite-4.0-micro \
  --url http://localhost:11434 \
  --request-count 10

Example with Custom Configuration

aiperf profile \
  --model "granite4:350m" \
  --streaming \
  --endpoint-type chat \
  --tokenizer ibm-granite/granite-4.0-micro \
  --url http://localhost:11434 \
  --concurrency 5 \
  --request-count 10

Example output:

NOTE: The example performance is reflective of a CPU-only run and does not represent an official benchmark.

                                               NVIDIA AIPerf | LLM Metrics
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃                               Metric ┃       avg ┃      min ┃       max ┃       p99 ┃       p90 ┃       p50 ┃      std ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━┩
│             Time to First Token (ms) │  7,463.28 │ 7,125.81 │  9,484.24 │  9,295.48 │  7,596.62 │  7,240.23 │   677.23 │
│            Time to Second Token (ms) │     68.73 │    32.01 │    102.86 │    102.55 │     99.80 │     67.37 │    24.95 │
│      Time to First Output Token (ms) │  7,463.28 │ 7,125.81 │  9,484.24 │  9,295.48 │  7,596.62 │  7,240.23 │   677.23 │
│                 Request Latency (ms) │ 13,829.40 │ 9,029.36 │ 27,905.46 │ 27,237.77 │ 21,228.48 │ 11,338.31 │ 5,614.32 │
│             Inter Token Latency (ms) │     65.31 │    53.06 │     81.31 │     81.24 │     80.64 │     63.79 │     9.09 │
│     Output Token Throughput Per User │     15.60 │    12.30 │     18.85 │     18.77 │     18.08 │     15.68 │     2.05 │
│                    (tokens/sec/user) │           │          │           │           │           │           │          │
│      Output Sequence Length (tokens) │     95.20 │    29.00 │    295.00 │    283.12 │    176.20 │     63.00 │    77.08 │
│       Input Sequence Length (tokens) │    550.00 │   550.00 │    550.00 │    550.00 │    550.00 │    550.00 │     0.00 │
│ Output Token Throughput (tokens/sec) │      6.85 │      N/A │       N/A │       N/A │       N/A │       N/A │      N/A │
│    Request Throughput (requests/sec) │      0.07 │      N/A │       N/A │       N/A │       N/A │       N/A │      N/A │
│             Request Count (requests) │     10.00 │      N/A │       N/A │       N/A │       N/A │       N/A │      N/A │
└──────────────────────────────────────┴───────────┴──────────┴───────────┴───────────┴───────────┴───────────┴──────────┘

CLI Command: aiperf profile --model 'granite4:350m' --streaming --endpoint-type 'chat' --tokenizer 'ibm-granite/granite-4.0-micro' --url 'http://localhost:11434'
Benchmark Duration: 138.89 sec
CSV Export: /home/user/aiperf/artifacts/granite4:350m-openai-chat-concurrency1/profile_export_aiperf.csv
JSON Export: /home/user/Code/aiperf/artifacts/granite4:350m-openai-chat-concurrency1/profile_export_aiperf.json
Log File: /home/user/Code/aiperf/artifacts/granite4:350m-openai-chat-concurrency1/logs/aiperf.log

Features

• Scalable multiprocess architecture with 10 services communicating via ZMQ
• 3 UI modes: dashboard (real-time TUI), simple (progress bars), none (headless)
• Multiple benchmarking modes: concurrency, request-rate, request-rate with max concurrency, trace replay
• Extensible plugin system for endpoints, datasets, transports, and metrics
• Public dataset support including ShareGPT and custom formats

Supported APIs

• OpenAI chat completions, completions, embeddings, audio, images
• NIM embeddings, rankings

Tutorials and Feature Guides

Getting Started

• Basic Tutorial - Profile Qwen3-0.6B with vLLM
• Comprehensive Benchmarking Guide - 5 real-world use cases
• YAML Configuration Files - Drive AIPerf from a config file instead of CLI flags
• Sampling Distributions in YAML Configs - Fixed, Normal, Log-normal, Multimodal, and Empirical shapes for ISL/OSL/turns/etc.
• User Interface - Dashboard, simple, or headless
• Hugging Face TGI - Profile Hugging Face TGI models
• OpenAI Text Endpoints - Profile OpenAI-compatible text APIs

Load Control and Timing

• Request Rate with Max Concurrency - Dual request control
• Arrival Patterns - Constant, Poisson, gamma traffic
• Prefill Concurrency - Memory-safe long-context benchmarking
• Gradual Ramping - Smooth ramp-up of concurrency and request rate
• Warmup Phase - Eliminate cold-start effects
• User-Centric Timing - Per-user rate limiting for KV cache benchmarking
• Request Cancellation - Timeout and resilience testing
• Multi-URL Load Balancing - Distribute across servers

Workloads and Data

• Trace Benchmarking - Deterministic workload replay
• Bailian Traces - Bailian production trace replay
• BurstGPT Traces - BurstGPT real-world bursty traffic trace replay
• SageMaker Data Capture - Replay production traffic from SageMaker endpoints
• Custom Prompt Benchmarking - Send exact prompts as-is
• Custom Dataset - Custom dataset formats
• Inline Datasets - Embed records directly in the YAML config (single_turn, multi_turn, multi-pool random_pool, traces)
• ShareGPT Dataset - Profile with ShareGPT dataset
• AIMO Dataset - Profile with AIMO math reasoning datasets (NuminaMath-TIR, NuminaMath-CoT, NuminaMath-1.5, AIME)
• MMStar Dataset - Profile vision language models with MMStar visual QA benchmark
• MMVU Dataset - Profile video language models with MMVU expert-level video understanding benchmark
• VisionArena Dataset - Profile with real-world vision conversations from Chatbot Arena
• LLaVA-OneVision Dataset - Profile with diverse multimodal instruction-following data
• SPEED-Bench Dataset - Profile speculative decoding with SPEED-Bench
• InstructCoder Dataset - Profile with InstructCoder code generation dataset
• SpecBench Dataset - Profile with SpecBench speculative decoding dataset
• Blazedit Dataset - Profile with Blazedit code editing dataset
• ASR Datasets - Profile ASR models with LibriSpeech, VoxPopuli, GigaSpeech, AMI, and SPGISpeech
• Synthetic Dataset Generation - Generate synthetic datasets
• Agentic Code Generator - Generate multi-turn coding-agent traces for KV cache benchmarking
• Fixed Schedule - Precise timestamp-based execution
• Time-based Benchmarking - Duration-based testing
• Sequence Distributions - Mixed ISL/OSL pairings
• Prefix Synthesis - Prefix data synthesis for KV cache testing
• Reproducibility - Deterministic datasets with --random-seed
• Template Endpoint - Custom Jinja2 request templates
• Multi-Turn Conversations - Multi-turn conversation benchmarking
• Raw Payload Replay - Verbatim JSONL payload replay (single file or directory)
• Inputs JSON Replay - Verbatim multi-turn replay of AIPerf inputs.json artifacts
• Local Tokenizer - Use local tokenizers without HuggingFace

Endpoint Types

• Embeddings - Profile embedding models
• Rankings - Profile ranking models
• OpenAI Responses API - Profile OpenAI Responses API endpoints
• Audio - Profile audio language models
• NIM Image Retrieval - Profile NIM image retrieval models
• Vision - Profile vision language models
• Image Generation - Benchmark any OpenAI-compatible image generation API
• SGLang Image Edit - Benchmark OpenAI-compatible image-to-image (image edit) endpoints
• SGLang Video Generation - Video generation benchmarking
• Synthetic Video - Synthetic video generation

Analysis and Monitoring

• Timeslice Metrics - Per-timeslice performance analysis
• Goodput - SLO-based throughput measurement
• Parameter Sweeps - YAML reference for grid/zip/scenarios sweeps + multi-run, with picker for choosing a sweep mode
• Adaptive Search - Bayesian-optimization walkthrough (single-objective + multi-objective Pareto)
• Search Recipes - Named recipe catalog including pareto-sweep, max-throughput-ttft-sla, max-concurrency-under-sla
• HTTP Trace Metrics - DNS, TCP/TLS, TTFB timing
• Multi-Run Confidence - Confidence intervals across repeated runs
• Profile Exports - Post-processing with Pydantic models
• Visualization and Plotting - PNG charts and multi-run comparison
• Auto-Plot After Profile - Run aiperf plot automatically after aiperf profile
• GPU Telemetry - DCGM metrics collection
• OTel + MLflow Live Telemetry - Stream metrics to OTel and MLflow in real time
• Weights & Biases Export - Upload results tables and artifacts to wandb
• Server Metrics - Prometheus-compatible metrics

Documentation

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for development setup, coding conventions, and contribution guidelines.

Known Issues

• Output sequence length constraints (--output-tokens-mean) cannot be guaranteed unless you pass ignore_eos and/or min_tokens via --extra-inputs to an inference server that supports them.
• Very high concurrency settings (typically >15,000) may lead to port exhaustion on some systems. Adjust system limits or reduce concurrency if connection failures occur.
• Startup errors caused by invalid configuration settings can cause AIPerf to hang indefinitely. Terminate the process and check configuration settings.
• Copying selected text may not work reliably in the dashboard UI. Use the c key to copy all logs.