A self-taught engineer deployed disaggregated DeepSeek inference for a high-traffic chat product, achieving 0.52s time-to-first-token on V2-Lite using a shared LMCache layer in host RAM across prefiller and decoder GPUs. The setup sustained ~11 req/s on 3× A100s, below the 60 req/s target but demonstrating that prefix-heavy caching is the right architecture for chat workloads.