latency
5 posts — newest first.
-
Percentiles, Properly: You Cannot Average a p99
Averaging percentiles across shards or minutes produces a number that means nothing. Here is the arithmetic, plus why p99 gets worse as you add services.
-
Queueing Theory for SREs: Little's Law and the Utilisation Knee
Latency doesn't rise with load, it rises with 1/(1−utilisation). Two formulas explain the p99 cliff and size every pool in your system.
-
Timeouts and Deadline Propagation: The Budget Nobody Sets
A timeout is a local guess; a deadline is a shared fact. The difference decides whether your system sheds doomed work or grinds on abandoned requests.
-
Garbage Collection: The Convenience That Shows Up in Your p99
GC frees you from manual memory management — and occasionally freezes your program. Reachability, generational GC, and why GC tuning is a p99 problem.
-
How TCP/IP Actually Works — and Why the Handshake Still Bites You
Every API call and model request rides on TCP/IP. The three-way handshake, flow control, and why round-trips and TIME_WAIT shape your latency.