Fragmented by Design: How GPU Memory Allocation Patterns Are Quietly Collapsing Batch Inference Economics
GPU memory fragmentation is one of the most underdiagnosed failure modes in production ML infrastructure, silently throttling batch throughput while conventional profiling tools report nothing unusual. This analysis examines the mechanics of how fragmentation accumulates, why standard observability stacks are structurally blind to it, and what engineering teams can do before the economics of their inference pipelines collapse entirely.