What is Network Latency?

The time needed for a packet of data to move from one location to another is called network latency. It can be described as both relative time or absolute time with consideration of when the request was sent.

The quantity of latency that is acceptable relies on the action a user performs online. Email and web browsing have a lower level of latency as opposed to video chatting or gaming.

This covers both the real distance traveled by the data and the time it takes to be evaluated. As an illustration, suppose you're watching a video on Youtube. The video you're watching is really stored on a server in Arizona, but when you press "play," your request travels across multiple servers before arriving at the destination. 

When your request reaches the server where the video is stored, it must be evaluated before it can be returned to you. It takes time for all of this to happen. High latency causes an additional wait between the time you push the play button and the time the video begins to run.

Latency is a measurement of time. To be exact, the amount of time it takes for a transaction to be fulfilled. Throughput, on the other hand, is the amount of work. It is measured in the number of transactions per second.

It is better when the displayed latency is lower. Full router queues, low bandwidth connection, and overloaded servers might result in high latency. It is described in milliseconds. 400 ms means 400 milliseconds, and 500 ms means 500 milliseconds.

50 milliseconds equals one-tenth of a second and is roughly the maximum amount of latency that a human brain can tolerate, according to data technology specialists. Even though this is sufficient for most people, gamers, for example, might prefer lower latencies. Professional gamers consider anything more than 100 milliseconds of latency to be too excessive for a decent experience of gaming.

The characteristic of network latency is very important in the context of cryptocurrencies and blockchain. The reason is that it directly impacts the time taken for a transaction to be accepted.

Lowering the number of HTTP requests or decreasing the response time from your servers is the greatest way to maximize the correlation between latency and throughput. It might also be a good method to attempt to cache as much data as possible and to combine database requests whenever feasible.

Attempting to raise the throughput of HTTP requests without taking latency into account would only result in performance concerns. The objective should be to maximize throughput while minimizing delay.

Furthermore, a consensus mechanism is where miners depend on speed to earn rewards. Also, blockchains are based on it. Every second that a new block isn’t found and added to the blockchain, potential revenue is lost.