Latency you own this product

Reduce delay in software systems
Pekka Enberg
  • MEAP began May 2024
  • Publication in Spring 2025 (estimated)
  • ISBN 9781633438088
  • 350 pages (estimated)
  • printed in black & white

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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.

about the book

Latency shows you how to troubleshoot latency issues in existing systems, and how to create low latency systems from the ground up. You’ll discover how your code runs differently on distributed systems, databases, and operating systems, and understand the common latency-causing issues in each situation. Hands-on projects help you apply what you learn.

You’ll write a latency benchmark harness to measure and visualize latency; and use colocation, partitioning, and caching to reduce latency in a REST API. Plus, tips, tricks, and author Pekka Enberg’s personal insights on latency ensure this book will remain a handy reference long after you’ve finished reading!

about the reader

For software engineers with a working knowledge of backends. Examples in Rust.

about the author

Pekka Enberg is a software professional with a background and experience in operating systems, databases, and distributed systems and a research interest in low-latency networked systems. In the past, Pekka has worked on the Linux kernel as a maintainer of the dynamic memory allocator subsystem and on ScyllaDB, an Apache Cassandra-compatible, distributed database focusing on low-latency and high throughput.

The book covers most of the important topics including partitioning, replication, caching and OS level optimizations. It covers both software and hardware details to understand what contributes to latency and how it can be improved.

Shubham Patel, Senior Software Engineer, Apple

I miss books like this (well organized and a fair mix of practical examples, analogies and theory). I am looking forward to having a copy on my bookshelf.’

Artur Baruchi, Senior Software Engineer, Heo

I would recommend this book to any junior team member who is not well versed in low latency and curious about basic concepts of such applications.

Rene Perrin, Director of Software Engineering, CME group

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choose your plan

team

monthly
annual
$49.99
$399.99
only $33.33 per month
  • five seats for your team
  • access to all Manning books, MEAPs, liveVideos, liveProjects, and audiobooks!
  • choose another free product every time you renew
  • choose twelve free products per year
  • exclusive 50% discount on all purchases
  • Latency ebook for free