How To Measure Latency?
Latency can be measured in the following ways.
- Time to First Byte: Whenever any connection is established, the time taken for the first byte of data from server to client is known as the Time to First Byte.
- Round Trip Time: It is basically the combined time in sending a request and receiving the response from the server.
- Ping Command: It basically does the same thing in that it determines the time required for the 32 bytes of data to reach its destination.
What is Latency?
Being simple latency means whenever you have given input to the system and the total time period it takes to give output so that particular time period/interval is known as latency.
Actually, latency is the in-between handling time of computers, as some of you may think that whenever some system connects with another system it happens directly but no it isn’t, the signal or data follows the proper traceroute for reaching its final destination.
Nowadays fiber optic cables are used for transmitting signals/data from one place to another with the speed of light but obviously before reaching the final destiny the data/signal has to pass many checkpoints or posts and follow a proper traceroute so it takes some time to get respond from the receiver and that total round of time is known as latency.
If you want to know the fastest possible network connection you could have from one place to another then we will suppose light as a medium because light just takes 100 milliseconds(approx.) to take a round of earth. So according to the data if you let light as a medium then you can send 20 packets per second across the other sides of the world.