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Benchmark & Optimize LLM App Performance

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Benchmark & Optimize LLM App Performance

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Gain insight into a topic and learn the fundamentals.
Intermediate level

Recommended experience

4 hours to complete
Flexible schedule
Learn at your own pace

Gain insight into a topic and learn the fundamentals.
Intermediate level

Recommended experience

4 hours to complete
Flexible schedule
Learn at your own pace

What you'll learn

  • Optimize LLM behavior using structured prompting and self-checks to reduce variance and errors.

  • Design scalable middleware to manage API requests, retries, caching, and token budgets for performance targets.

  • Build user-centered interfaces that collect feedback and improve LLM accuracy and user trust.

Details to know

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Recently updated!

December 2025

Assessments

1 assignment

Taught in English

Build your subject-matter expertise

This course is part of the Build Next-Gen LLM Apps with LangChain & LangGraph Specialization
When you enroll in this course, you'll also be enrolled in this Specialization.
  • Learn new concepts from industry experts
  • Gain a foundational understanding of a subject or tool
  • Develop job-relevant skills with hands-on projects
  • Earn a shareable career certificate

There are 3 modules in this course

Benchmark & Optimize LLM App Performance is a hands-on journey from “it works” to “it flies.” You’ll start by treating speed and cost as product features-defining a baseline with the right metrics (p50/p95 latency, tokens/sec, throughput, determinism, cost per task) and building a lightweight benchmarking harness you can rerun on every change. Next, you’ll learn to hunt bottlenecks across the stack-network, model, prompt, and post-processing-using practical patterns that cut tokens without cutting quality, plus caching strategies for embeddings, RAG, and tool calls. Then you’ll run A/B/C experiments to compare models and prompts on the same dataset, interpret results with simple stats, and choose a winner confidently. Finally, you’ll harden for production with concurrency limits, queues, timeouts, fallbacks, and a 30-day optimization playbook. Expect reusable templates, clear checklists, and realistic demos designed for busy developers and product builders who want measurable gains-not hype.

This course is designed for machine learning engineers, AI developers, data scientists, and product engineers who want to optimize and scale LLM-based applications for production environments. It’s also ideal for backend engineers and DevOps professionals aiming to enhance system performance, reduce latency, and improve cost-efficiency in AI deployments. Additionally, product managers and technical leads overseeing AI-powered systems will benefit from the practical insights provided, helping them to drive improvements in app performance and ensure that their LLM models deliver reliable, high-quality results at scale. This course requires basic knowledge of Python or JavaScript, familiarity with REST APIs, and a high-level understanding of how Large Language Models (LLMs) function. These skills will help you effectively engage with the course content, optimize performance, and implement solutions. By the end of this course, you'll have the skills to optimize LLM performance, tackle real-world bottlenecks, and implement efficient, scalable AI systems. You'll be ready to apply these techniques confidently, making your AI solutions faster, more reliable, and production-ready!

This module establishes why performance is a product feature, not a backend afterthought. We connect latency, cost, and answer quality to user-perceived speed (p50 vs p95, jitter) and trust. You’ll define a minimal metric set-latency, throughput, tokens/sec, determinism, and win-rate-then build a lightweight benchmarking harness that runs a small eval set, logs prompts/outputs, and exports clean CSVs. By the end, you’ll have a reproducible baseline you can rerun on every change.

What's included

4 videos2 readings1 peer review

4 videosTotal 26 minutes
  • Welcome to Benchmarking LLM Apps2 minutes
  • Metrics That Matter: Latency, Throughput & Token Efficiency7 minutes
  • Building a Minimal Benchmark Harness (Design Walkthrough)9 minutes
  • Run Your First Baseline & Export the Data8 minutes
2 readingsTotal 10 minutes
  • Welcome to the Course: Course Overview5 minutes
  • Evaluation Best Practices (OpenAI Docs)5 minutes
1 peer reviewTotal 25 minutes
  • Hands-On-Learning: Baseline or Bust: Your First Reproducible Benchmark25 minutes

In this module, you'll trace where time actually goes: network hops, model inference, prompt bloat, and post-processing. You’ll learn practical prompt patterns that cut tokens without cutting quality, plus schema-first I/O that improves stability and parsing. We’ll add caching strategies for embeddings, RAG retrievals, and tool calls, including cache keys and invalidation rules to avoid stale answers. Expect clear heuristics for cold vs warm paths and a simple checklist to shave seconds-not just milliseconds.

What's included

3 videos1 reading1 peer review

3 videosTotal 22 minutes
  • Designing Reliable API Calls for LLM Apps6 minutes
  • Rate Limits, Caching & Token Budgeting7 minutes
  • Building a Resilient Backend for LLM APIs8 minutes
1 readingTotal 5 minutes
  • OpenAI API Reference: Error Handling & Rate Limits5 minutes
1 peer reviewTotal 25 minutes
  • Hands-On-Learning: Backend Reliability Challenge: Handle It Smart25 minutes

The final module turns tuning into a disciplined workflow. You’ll run A/B/C tests across model tiers and prompt variants on the same dataset to compare latency, cost per task, and quality with simple stats - then pick a winner. We’ll cover safe scaling: concurrency limits, queues, backpressure, retries, timeouts, and graceful degradation/fallbacks. You’ll leave with a 30-day optimization plan and a production playbook that keeps your app fast, affordable, and reliable after launch.

What's included

4 videos1 reading1 assignment2 peer reviews

4 videosTotal 27 minutes
  • Why Experiment Design Beats Guesswork8 minutes
  • Shipping Safely: Canaries, Feature Flags & Rollbacks8 minutes
  • Run an A/B/C Test & Pick a Winner7 minutes
  • Course Wrap-up4 minutes
1 readingTotal 5 minutes
  • Working with Evals (OpenAI) - designing and running evals5 minutes
1 assignmentTotal 20 minutes
  • Benchmark & Optimize LLM App Performance20 minutes
2 peer reviewsTotal 85 minutes
  • Hands-On-Learning: Experiment Orchestrator: From Data to Decision 25 minutes
  • Project: Optimize & Ship Your LLM App v1.060 minutes

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