Most people seem obsessed with token generation speed, but isn’t prefill the real bottleneck? Am I missing something?

A Reddit practitioner raises a valid systems-level point: prefill throughput, not decode speed, dominates wall-clock latency for long-context workloads. Running Qwen2.5-27B Q6 at 300 t/s prefill versus 15 t/s decode, the prompt processing stage consumes disproportionate real time. Chunked prefill, flash attention, and KV cache optimizations remain underexplored in consumer benchmarking culture. Engineers building RAG pipelines or long-context applications should prioritize prefill benchmarks alongside decode metrics.