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Latency definition

I think definition of latency defined here is very broadbased. If we think at granular level Latency is time taken by system waiting for processing to happen. The response time is defined as time taken by user to get the response for his request. There is subtle difference between latency and response time. Do you agree ?


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Lesson: https://www.educative.io/collection/page/6064040858091520/6411938009448448/5894859313381376

Hi @Devidas_Gawade

This is very interesting to discuss. Latency and response time are very close to each other.

The word latent means inactive or dormant. Latency is the duration that a request is waiting to be handled. Until the request is handled, it is latent - inactive or dormant. A high latency indicates problems in the networking or that the server cannot handle a series of requests and is probably overloaded.

Response time is the total time for the web service to respond to the sent request, including all networking latencies. Response time is the sum of processing time and encountered latencies.

Hope we are getting things clear now!

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@Devidas_Gawade From the Mozilla doc. Latency is generally considered to be the amount of time it takes from when a request is made by the user to the time it takes for the response to get back to that user.

Also:

Network latency is the time it takes for a data request to get from the computer making the request, to the computer responding. Including the time it takes for a byte of data to make it from the responding computer back to the requesting computer. It is generally measured as a round trip delay.

Disk latency is the time it takes from the moment a computer, usually a server, receives a request, to the time the computer returns the response.

I’ve stated disk latency as application latency in the lesson.