Your Average Latency Is Fine and Your Users Are Not
Mean latency is a number that describes nobody. Here is why the tail dominates real user experience, how retries multiply it, and which percentiles are…
| Percentile | What it tells you | Who it describes |
|---|---|---|
| p50 | The typical request | Your median user, one request |
| p90 | Where the bulk ends | Users on a slightly worse path |
| p99 | The tail begins | One in a hundred requests, every heavy user |
| p99.9 | Your worst real experience | Your most valuable and most active users |
Related reading: HTTP Keep-Alive vs TCP Keep-Alive: They Are Not the Same Header explores a connected angle.
Related reading: Valkey-proxy: Migrating Redis Without the Rewrite explores a connected angle.
Related reading: The 4 MB JSON Response That Compression Fixed explores a connected angle.
Published on debugly.dev by Rohit Bhadani | Founder of Krova Cloud
