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Latency

Latency is the time delay between making a request and receiving the start of its response.

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What matters

Latency directly shapes how responsive an application feels to a user, independent of how much total work the system can handle overall.

Example

A page that takes three seconds before it starts showing any content has high latency, regardless of how quickly it finishes loading everything after that.

Common misconception

Latency is not the same as throughput; a system can have low latency for individual requests while still having limited total capacity under heavy load.

Recall question

How does latency differ from a system's overall capacity to handle requests?

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