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Software Engineering vocabulary · APIs, Networking and Security

Round-trip time

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounCommon term

In software engineering, round-trip time means: The 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.

In Turkish: gidiş-dönüş süresi, RTT

How it is used

Often shortened to RTT. Used in performance tests, SLA reports and application tuning. Engineers compare average, minimum and maximum round-trip times. Distance matters: light in fibre needs about 5 ms to travel 1,000 km one way.

Example sentences

  1. The round-trip time from Istanbul to London is usually around 50 to 60 ms.

  2. The round-trip time jumps to 300 ms every time the backup runs.

Common collocations

  • average round-trip time
  • measure the round-trip time
  • high round-trip time
  • RTT
  • latencyThe time a request or piece of data takes to travel through a system and get a response, usually measured in milliseconds.
  • pingTo send someone a short message, usually in team chat, to ask a question, remind them or get their attention. Technically, also to test whether a server can be reached.
  • jitterVariation in the delay of packets arriving over a network; when packets arrive at uneven intervals, voice and video calls become choppy or robotic.
  • tracerouteA diagnostic tool that lists every router a packet passes through on its way to a destination, with the delay to each one, so you can see where traffic slows down or stops.

This word in other fields

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

More terms: APIs, Networking and Security

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