What is Latency?
Turkish: Gecikme
Latency is the time it takes for a network request to travel from source to destination and back; low latency is key to performance.
What is Latency?
Latency is the delay between a user’s action and the system returning a meaningful response. In web applications, it is affected by network travel time, DNS lookup, TLS handshake, server processing, database queries, and browser rendering.
Latency is usually more useful when tracked as p50, p95, and p99 rather than only as an average. A small percentage of slow requests can still hurt checkout, search, or admin workflows. Low latency is not only about a fast server; user geography, cache strategy, third-party services, and payload size all contribute to the final experience.
How It Is Reduced
- Serving static assets from a CDN location close to the user
- Reducing network requests and shrinking unnecessary JavaScript or large JSON responses
- Improving database queries, indexes, and connection pool settings
- Adding timeouts, retries, and caching around external API calls
Latency should be measured end to end; backend duration alone does not represent real user experience. CDN helps with content delivery, edge computing moves work closer to users, and TTFB measures the first server response.
Related Terms
Bandwidth is the maximum data capacity a connection can carry per second; it does not define perceived speed by itself.
CDN (Content Delivery Network)A CDN caches static content on edge servers near users, reducing latency, bandwidth pressure, and load on the origin server.
Edge ComputingEdge computing processes data or application logic closer to users instead of sending every request to one central server.
ThroughputThroughput measures the number of requests, transactions, or data units a system can process per second, minute, or hour.