Latency vs Throughput
Noun · Development
Definitions
Two often-confused performance metrics: latency is the time for a single operation to complete (measured in ms), while throughput is the number of operations completed per unit time (measured in req/s, Mbps). They're not inverses — a system can have high latency but high throughput (batch processing) or low latency but low throughput (serial processing).
In plain English: Latency is how long one thing takes; throughput is how many things you can do per second — they're different measurements.
Example: "The database query takes 50ms (latency) but we can run 1,000 of them concurrently for 20,000 queries/second (throughput)."