SE Radio 277: Gil Tene on Tail Latency

Venue: QCon San Francisco 2016
Gil Tene joins Robert Blumen for a discussion of tail latency. What is latency? What is “tail latency”? Why are the upper percentiles of latency more relevant to humans? How is human interaction with an application influenced by tail latency? What are the economics of tail latency? What are the origins of tail latency within a system? What is the difference between response time and service time? How does queuing within a system contribute to response time? Java garbage collection and its contribution to latency outliers. How can we build systems with bounded tail latency out of components with variable latency? What type of observability to do we need to build systems with bounded latency? How is latency a driver of capacity planning?

Show Notes

Related Links

• How not to measure latency https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ8ydIuPFeU
• Your load generator is probably lying to you http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/10/5/your-load-generator-is-probably-lying-to-you-take-the-red-pi.html
• Gil Tene on Understanding Java Garbage Collection and what you can do about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we_enrM7TSY
• How One Second Could Cost Amazon $1.65 Billion in Sales http://www.fastcompany.com/1825005/how-one-second-could-cost-amazon-16-billion-sales
• The Tail at Scale http://www.cs.duke.edu/courses/cps296.4/fall13/838-CloudPapers/dean_longtail.pdf
• Everything you know about latency is wrong http://bravenewgeek.com/everything-you-know-about-latency-is-wrong/
• Google: Taming The Long Latency Tail – When More Machines Equals Worse Results http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/3/12/google-taming-the-long-latency-tail-when-more-machines-equal.html
• Who moved my 99th percentile latency? https://engineering.linkedin.com/performance/who-moved-my-99th-percentile-latency
• Gil Tene’s Twitter: twitter.com/giltene