Dispatch Overhead, Not Kernel Quality: The Performance Bottleneck in Single-Stream WebGPU LLM Inference

arXiv:2608.08730v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models are increasingly deployed in resource-constrained, single-stream settings, from internet browsers to edge devices, where requests arrive one at a time at batch size 1 rather than in large batches. In this regime, where WebGPU serves as a modern cross-platform standard, per-operation dispatch overhead, rather than kernel compute, can dominate inference cost, yet it remains poorly characterized. In this work, we introduce a sequential-dispatch measurement method and show that naive single-operation measurements overestimate per-dispatch cost by conflating dispatch with synchronization. Using our method, we measure the per-dispatch cost and show that it is independent of data type used. Through a controlled fusion experiment, we show that the dispatch overhead, not kernel quality, is the bottleneck at batch size 1, and isolate the dispatch count as the cause. We conclude that at batch size 1, the effective approach to LLM inference optimization in WebGPU is reducing dispatch count. Our findings point to dispatch amortization, in the inference engines and in the WebGPU specification, as a path to practical browser-based inference.