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Glossary Networking

Latency

Latency is the delay between sending a request and starting to receive the response, usually measured in milliseconds.

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In more detail

Latency depends mostly on distance (light in fibre travels roughly 200 km per millisecond), the number of network hops and how busy the equipment is. It is not the same as Bandwidth: a satellite link can have high bandwidth and high latency. Latency matters most for calls, games and anything interactive. ping measures it.

Try these tools

HTTP Latency Checker

Measure the server-side HTTP round-trip time to any website — a browser-friendly substitute for ping.

See also

  • Glossary Bandwidth
    Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data a connection can carry per second, usually quoted in megabits per second (Mbps).
  • Glossary CDN
    A CDN (content delivery network) is a network of servers around the world that stores copies of a site's files and serves them from the.
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