Streaming vs. Batch: Choosing the Right LLM Delivery Mode for Your Agents

Streaming every LLM response is wasteful. Batching everything adds unnecessary latency. The optimal delivery mode depends on what your agent does — and SpiderGate lets you configure this per agent, per task, or per request.

The Three Modes

Streaming

Tokens are delivered as they're generated. The agent starts processing before the full response is complete.

Best for:

• Customer-facing chatbots (perceived speed)

• Real-time translation agents

• Interactive coding assistants

Trade-offs:

• Higher connection overhead

• More complex error handling

• Cannot benefit from response-level caching

Batch

The complete response is generated, then delivered as a single payload.

Best for:

• Document processing agents

• Data extraction pipelines

• Background analysis tasks

• Agents that need the complete response before acting

Trade-offs:

• Higher perceived latency (time to first token = time to complete)

• Simpler to cache and retry

• Lower connection overhead

Hybrid

SpiderGate buffers tokens until a semantic boundary (sentence, paragraph, or custom delimiter), then delivers in chunks.

Best for:

• Agents that process response sections independently

• Summary generation with progressive updates

• Agents feeding downstream systems that batch-process

Configuration

agent: customer-support-bot
delivery:
  mode: streaming
  buffer_size: 0  # immediate delivery

agent: document-analyzer
delivery:
  mode: batch
  timeout: 30s

agent: report-generator
delivery:
  mode: hybrid
  chunk_boundary: paragraph
  max_buffer: 500_tokens

Performance Comparison

| Metric | Streaming | Batch | Hybrid | |--------|-----------|-------|--------| | Time to First Token | ~200ms | ~2000ms | ~500ms | | Connection Overhead | High | Low | Medium | | Cache Hit Rate | Low | High | Medium | | Error Recovery | Complex | Simple | Medium | | Cost per Request | Baseline | -5% | -3% |

When to Switch Modes

SpiderGate supports dynamic mode switching based on:

• Request payload size (large prompts → batch)

• Time of day (peak hours → batch for background agents)

• Provider load (high load → batch to reduce connection pressure)

• Agent priority (critical → streaming, low → batch)

Delivery mode configuration is available in SpiderGate V2.0+.