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Throughput and latency are two terms that are often used in IT circles, but few fully understand and distinguish between these two words. To establish a baseline understanding we will go over both terms, their relationship to one another, and a scenario in which they can be used.
Table of Contents
What is throughput?
Throughput is a measure of the number of units processed or transferred over time. It quantifies the volume of work that a system can achieve per unit of time.
It is typically measured in units of transactions per second. For example, throughput can be calculated as the number of items being processed per hour.
Throughput is a key measure of performance for any system that requires continuous performance without interruption, such as voice-over IP or online banking websites.
What is latency?
Latency refers to the delay between when something happens and when a response occurs. Latency can vary from milliseconds to hours and from one user to another.
Latency is the most important metric of importance because it is the measure of responsiveness or throughput. Latency can therefore be referred to as the time lapse between data being released and the time delay to its set destination.
Measures of Network Performance
Latency and throughput are a measure of network performance preferably denoted as bit error rate (BER) and packet error rate (PER). This means that understanding these two words and knowing how to improve them is very crucial. It is important to differentiate these two terms by their definition and their purpose.
Throughput, Latency, and Bandwidth
The relationship between these three words is an important consideration especially because they are closely related. Bandwidth is the measure of the number of packets that are moved in the network. To understand this, take this as a physical pipe that transports water or waste.
The pipe will have to restrict the amount of content that passes through it at a given time. In this regard, the contents are the packets that are transferred in the network at a given time. Moving on, the time that this content (Packets of data) takes to travel from the source to the destination is what is referred to as Latency.
In this example, latency is the time it takes for the packets of data to get to the user end. Next, throughput is now the term that represents how much content (Data packets) can be processed in a given time.
Understanding that makes it easy to realize that these two terms are related in the way they work. Here are the three easy relationships between Latency, Bandwidth, and Throughput.
- Bandwidth is hereby referred to as the maximum number of conversations that the network can support. The conversations are the exchanges of data from one end to the other.
- Latency will now measure how quickly the conversations take. If the latency is high, then the longer conversations take to hold.
- we have already stated that throughput is the amount of data transferred within a conversation. Therefore, the level of latency will determine the maximum throughput.
The amount of data that can be transferred and latency are inversely related. This is mainly because it takes longer for this data to be transmitted.
FAQs
Why are network latency and throughput important?
Bandwidth can be used as a measure of performance, whereas latency affects how well a network performs. In case thereโs high bandwidth, more information can be sent at the same time. However, if there are high latencies, the resources being utilized are taken away from using them properly.
Is latency the inverse of throughput?
Throughput and latency are not inverse; they work differently as we have explained above. You might have low latency and high throughput.
What factors does Latency depend on?
Two main factors affect latency within a network; physical distance and the number of nodes that are present between the originator and the final destination.
Conclusion
Now you understand the meaning of throughput and latency and how the two are related. With this information, you can now properly use these terms in your day-to-day activities. And also, to establish what is affecting your network and how this affects the flow of data going into and out of the network.
