Latency

1 Introduction

This chapter covers

• Defining what latency means
• Measuring latency
• Motivating optimizing for latency
• Comparing latency to throughput and bandwidth
• Trade-offs when optimizing for latency

This book is about how to build low-latency applications. Latency is crucial across a wide range of use cases today. When your application suddenly slows down under load, when a database query that should take milliseconds stretches into seconds, or when users abandon your service because pages won’t load, you need concrete solutions. However, many low-latency techniques are effectively developer folklore, hidden in blog posts, mailing lists, and side notes in books on performance optimization.

This book provides the specific techniques, ...