{"id":901,"date":"2019-03-11T12:51:46","date_gmt":"2019-03-11T10:51:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/excentiscom.webhosting.be\/?p=901"},"modified":"2022-06-24T08:11:24","modified_gmt":"2022-06-24T06:11:24","slug":"latency-in-a-nutshell-and-what-makes-it-so-important","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.excentis.com\/blog\/latency-in-a-nutshell-and-what-makes-it-so-important\/","title":{"rendered":"Latency in a nutshell, and what makes it so important"},"content":{"rendered":"

VOIP solutions and video chat apps are part of our business and personal lives \u2013 and online multiplayer games have become mainstream hobbies. To enable these applications, huge volumes of data are being exchanged online at ever-more-massive rates.\u00a0A delay in the transmission of data \u2013 i.e. latency \u2013 can have an enormous impact on user experience<\/span><\/p>\n

Analogous to road transport, having more trucks on the road will result in a higher throughput, but will have no effect on the travel time. Even a little bit of latency is noticeable \u2013 and irritating \u2013, which is why it\u2019s key to keep it to a minimum.<\/p>\n

So, network latency describes the delays associated with transmitting data packages from source to destination through a network. By contrast, bandwidth refers to a network\u2019s max data transfer rate over a certain amount of time. While the effects of both latency and bandwidth bottlenecks can look similar and even magnify each other, their causes are different.<\/p>\n

Network latency in action: obvious from 200 milliseconds<\/h2>\n

To demonstrate the effects of latency, let\u2019s load our website www.excentis.com, but we\u2019ll add a fraction of latency to the network. The image on the top shows the results of 10ms latency, the middle image shows 60 milliseconds and the bottom image shows 510 milliseconds.<\/p>\n

With only 60 milliseconds of latency, the site loads noticeably slower than the first. When the loading time reaches 2s or more, users will very likely abandon the session. Attempting the same demonstration by limiting bandwidth results in no difference. Loading a map in Google Maps, for example, will take significantly more time on a high-latency network vs. a low-latency one, even though the data throughput is the same.<\/p>\n

Browsers deploy a few tricks to minimize this impact. For example, they fetch content simultaneously. If the site you\u2019re visiting contains many or very large images, they can all be downloaded together. Modern browsers maintain persistent connections with high-data-volume websites (persistent connection model), or request data multiple times in succession without waiting for a response from the network (HTTP pipelining). These approaches are great for browsers, but they can\u2019t be used in other applications.<\/p>\n

What causes latency<\/h2>\n