Latency

How it is used

Very common when talking about voice, video, gaming, trading and cloud applications. Latency is high or low, it increases or spikes, and engineers measure, monitor and reduce it. Users usually say 'lag'; engineers say 'latency'.

Example sentences

1. Latency to the Frankfurt data centre jumped from 30 ms to 180 ms this morning.

2. Satellite links have high latency because the signal travels a very long distance.

Common collocations

• high latency
• low latency
• latency spike
• measure latency
• network latency

Related terms

• bandwidthThe maximum amount of data a connection can carry in a given time, usually measured in megabits or gigabits per second (Mbps, Gbps).
• jitterVariation in the delay of packets arriving over a network; when packets arrive at uneven intervals, voice and video calls become choppy or robotic.
• round-trip timeThe time it takes for a packet to travel from a source to a destination and for the reply to come back, usually shown in milliseconds; ping reports this value.
• pingTo send a small test message to another device and wait for a reply, in order to check whether it can be reached and how long the round trip takes.
• packet lossA situation in which some packets sent across a network never reach their destination, usually shown as a percentage; it causes slow downloads, choppy calls and frozen video.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

• latency · Software Engineering
• latency · Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
• latency · Cloud Computing & DevOps
• latency · Game Development

More terms: Bandwidth, Latency and Reliability

• throughput
• QoS
• bottleneck
• congestion
• redundancy
• failover