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Software Engineering vocabulary · Release and Maintenance

Latency

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

/ˈleɪtənsi/nounCore term

In software engineering, latency means: The time a request or piece of data takes to travel through a system and get a response, usually measured in milliseconds.

In Turkish: gecikme, gecikme süresi, yanıt gecikmesi

How it is used

Latency is high or low, spikes and increases. Teams track percentiles such as p95 or p99 latency (the time within which 95 or 99 percent of requests finish), because averages hide slow requests.

Example sentences

  1. p99 latency went from 200 to 900 milliseconds after the new release.

  2. Users in Asia see higher latency because all our servers are in Europe.

Common collocations

  • high latency
  • low latency
  • latency spike
  • p99 latency
  • reduce latency
  • throughputThe amount of work a system completes in a given time, for example requests per second, messages per minute or megabytes per second.
  • bottleneckThe one slowest or most limited part of a system, such as the database or the network, that holds back the performance of everything else.
  • CDNContent Delivery Network: a network of servers around the world that stores copies of a site's files and delivers them from the location closest to each user.
  • regionA geographic area where a cloud provider has a group of data centers, such as Frankfurt or Ireland. You choose the region where your resources run.
  • metricA number measured regularly over time to show how a system is behaving, such as CPU use, memory, request count or error rate.

This word in other fields

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

More terms: Release and Maintenance

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