What is Latency?
Latency is the delay between a request being made and the response starting to arrive, such as the time from tapping a button to seeing a result, usually measured in milliseconds. It differs from throughput, which measures how much work a system completes per second rather than how fast each request is.
Why it matters for your business
Users notice slow responses quickly, and high latency lowers conversions, frustrates staff using internal tools and can make AI or real-time features feel broken.
An e-commerce team serves product images from a CDN close to shoppers and caches popular search results, cutting page response times noticeably for overseas customers.