Networking Beginner

What is Latency?

The time delay between sending a request and receiving a response, measured in milliseconds.

Latency measures the round-trip time for data to travel between source and destination. It is affected by physical distance, network congestion, routing hops, and processing time at each node.

Low latency is critical for real-time applications like gaming, video calls, and financial trading. CDNs, edge computing, and protocol optimization reduce latency.

Related Terms

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A geographically distributed network of servers that caches and delivers web content from locations closest to users for faster load times.

A network routing technique where the same IP address is announced from multiple locations, directing users to the nearest server.

A compact method for specifying IP addresses and their associated routing prefix using a slash followed by the prefix length.

NAT (Network Address Translation)

A method of mapping private IP addresses to public IP addresses, allowing multiple devices to share a single public IP.

ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol)

A network protocol used for diagnostic and error reporting, including ping and traceroute functionality.

A network security system that monitors and controls incoming and outgoing traffic based on predetermined rules.

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