Practical techniques for delivering low latency software.

Slow responses can kill good software. Whether it’s recovering microseconds lost while routing messages on a server or speeding up page loads that keep users waiting, finding and fixing latency can be a frustrating part of your work as a developer. This one-of-a-kind book shows you how to spot, understand, and respond to latency wherever it appears in your applications and infrastructure.

In Latency you’ll learn:

• What latency is—and what it is not
• How to model and measure latency
• Organizing your application data for low latency
• Making your code run faster
• Hiding latency when you can’t reduce it

Put simply, latency is the delay between a cause and effect. In practice, too much latency can create problems throughout a software system, ranging from inaccurate calculations and timeouts to impatient users simply abandoning your applications. Latency issues can be challenging to avoid and troubleshoot. This book balances theory with practical implementations, turning academic research into useful techniques you can apply to your projects.