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Zhipu Reveals Root Cause of GLM-5 Output Degradation: KV Cache Race Conditions Under Load

Zhipu's engineering team published a deep technical post explaining three GLM-5 anomalies encountered during high-load coding-agent traffic: garbled output, repetitive generation, and rare-character output. Root causes traced to KV Cache race conditions in their PD-separated inference architecture and timing overlap between HiCache loading and compute. Fixes: explicit synchronization between request termination and KV write completion, plus a new LayerSplit hierarchical KV storage design. Quote: "Our inference infrastructure is under unprecedented pressure, serving hundreds of millions of coding-agent calls daily." Rare first-hand production debugging account from a major Chinese model lab.