Hidden Costs of LiteLLM's Health Checks

Published: 2026-08-15 We run LiteLLM as an internal gateway in front of two kinds of models: local vLLM deployments and paid external models. At the time of the incident, the proxy was running LiteLLM 1.82.x with four replicas, Redis for shared state, and background model health checks enabled. The relevant part of the configuration looked like this: g eneral_settings : b ackground_health_checks : true u se_shared_health_check : true h ealth_check_interval : 30 h ealth_check_concurrency : 4 The problem showed up in the external provider's usage view. Over roughly one to two weeks, a key reserv

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