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Latency

The time between issuing a request and receiving its response, properly described by a distribution — median versus p99 — because rare slow outliers, not the average, dominate user experience in fan-out systems.

Questions this Concept answers

Why can a database report excellent throughput while users still describe every page as sluggish?

jeremy Text

Latency and Throughput

Latency is how long one request takes from start to finish; throughput is how many requests finish per unit of time. They are not the same thing, and improving one can hurt the other: batching work r…