1. Caching the input will save lots of time. Inputs are not unique each time. In a production environment, lots of inputs are the same. Many platforms in fact will do caching such as Algorithmia, TF Serving, and Sagemaker. If a time to do a search in Redis database is faster than forward pass, caching will reduce time dramatically. Watch my youtube video where I give an example.
2. It's up to you if you want to use it in GPU or CPU. Benchmark was done in a CPU but you're free to download panini via Helm and use GPU in your private kubernetes.
3. For now, during beta testing, we're offering free inference and there is a limit of model size cannot exceed over 2GB.
Hope this was helpful.