"How NOT to Measure Latency" by Gil Tene

Why HN readers recommended it

The canonical recommendation whenever percentiles, tail latency, load testing or averages come up, described by some as life changing.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

Strange Loop Conference

Topic

latency measurement

Format

talk

Level

intermediate

HN recommenders in dataset

9

HN mentions in dataset

20

Recommendation years in dataset

2015–2026

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

• Doesn't this depend on how "tuned" your subcomponents are? If I had a system that's supposedly heavily optimized, I would simply start seeing the worst-case latency on a higher percentile, 99.9th and so forth. Gil Tene has an excellent talk[1] on this. [1] [VIDEO]

• This topic always leads me to think about this great talk from Gil Tene on how NOT to measure latencies (basically, don't use averages!). [VIDEO] I'm also a huge fan of how Dormando showed latency distributions in one of his recent Memcached Extstore posts. The …

• This a life changing video by Gil Tene on this topic. Bottom line is because of the number requests to support a single customer "request", the high percentiles are the ones that actually matter. [VIDEO]