Research
Same Tool, Wildly Different Resource Profile: Faster LLM Responses Did Not Always Speed Up Agents
arXiv 2609.19947 (17 Sep 2026) profiles the resource dynamics of LLM agents that call remote APIs while running local tool containers, across retrieval-augmented QA, web search and software coding. Agent behavior varied widely by task, with the same tool showing substantially different resource dynamics depending on context, and concurrent request handling exposed task-dependent bottlenecks in CPU, disk I/O and memory. The counterintuitive result for anyone tuning an agent host is that neither faster LLM responses nor more CPU cores reliably accelerated the agent.
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