Tag
percentiles
- Sep 30, 2026 Coordinated Omission and the Samples a Closed Loop Never Takes How a benchmark that waits for each response before issuing the next one systematically excludes the worst delays from its own histogram, and the interval-based correction that recovers them. performance engineering
- Jun 11, 2026 Coordinated Omission in Latency Measurement Why measuring response time only for completed requests hides the worst delays, how the bias arises, and which measurement schemes avoid it without inventing numbers. backend systems
- Apr 24, 2026 Means, Percentiles, and What a Tail Measurement Can Answer Why the mean and the p99 are answers to different questions, what a percentile of a pooled sample says about an individual request, and the sub-second window where percentile estimates become unstable. performance engineering
- Feb 17, 2026 Designing for the Tails of an Ability Distribution, Not the Mean Why a design calibrated to an average body or an average user excludes most people, and how percentile bands and requirement envelopes replace the average as a design input. accessibility
- Dec 27, 2025 Fan-Out and the Amplification of Tail Latency How issuing a request to many backends converts a rare slow response into a common one, the arithmetic behind that amplification, and the structural ways to cap it. backend systems
- Nov 24, 2025 Measuring Latency Under Load Without Fooling Yourself How to design a delay measurement that separates fixed path delay from queueing, which load patterns expose bufferbloat, and why idle-path numbers mislead. networking
- Jul 10, 2025 Choosing an Objective Function for a Mixed Workload Means, percentiles, and goodput weight a workload mix differently, so the objective determines which optimization looks best before any measurement is taken. performance engineering
- Sep 2, 2024 Where Latency Is Measured, and Why Percentiles Do Not Average A serving latency number is a function of the point where the clock starts, and percentiles computed at different layers cannot be combined; both facts determine whether a monitoring figure means anything. inference systems
- Aug 19, 2024 Hedged Requests and the Arithmetic of Tail Latency Why the slowest of several parallel calls sets the latency of a fan-out, and how a delayed second attempt trades a fixed slice of extra load for a large reduction in the tail. backend systems
- Jun 27, 2024 Deriving Latency Targets from Percentile Distributions Why a percentile objective is really a tail-count budget, how bucket layout limits the achievable precision, and what a latency target costs in headroom. observability
- Aug 17, 2022 Aggregating Percentiles Across a Fleet Without Losing the Tail Why per-host percentiles cannot be combined directly, how cumulative bucketed histograms make merging exact, and what temporal aggregation does to the tail that spatial aggregation does not. performance engineering