Latency

Kafka Performance Tuning

Practical tuning levers on the producer, consumer, and broker sides for maximizing Kafka throughput and minimizing latency.

What is Connection Pooling?

Connection pooling is a technique where a fixed set of pre-established database connections is reused across multiple requests instead of opening and closing a…

What is Latency vs Bandwidth?

Latency is the time it takes a single piece of data to travel from sender to receiver, while bandwidth is the maximum volume of data that can move through a co…

What is the Nagle Algorithm and When Should You Disable It?

Nagle’s algorithm is a TCP send-side optimization that buffers small outgoing segments and coalesces them into one larger segment instead of firing off many ti…

LAN vs WAN vs MAN: What is the Difference?

LAN, MAN, and WAN describe networks at increasing geographic scale — a LAN (Local Area Network) covers a single building or campus under one organization’s con…

What is SD-WAN (Software-Defined WAN)?

SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network) is an approach to managing WAN connectivity that uses centralized software control to intelligently route traffic a…

Bandwidth vs Throughput: What is the Difference?

Bandwidth is the theoretical maximum data rate a link can carry, usually stated in bits per second, while throughput is the actual data rate achieved in practi…

What is Jitter in Networking?

Jitter is the variation in packet delay over time — instead of packets arriving at perfectly consistent intervals, their arrival times fluctuate, which is espe…

What is a CDN (Content Delivery Network)?

A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers that cache and serve content from locations physically close to end u…

What is Ping and How Does It Work?

Ping is a network diagnostic utility that sends ICMP Echo Request packets to a target host and measures whether it replies with an ICMP Echo Reply, reporting r…

What is Traceroute and How Does It Work?

Traceroute is a network diagnostic tool that reveals the sequence of routers (hops) a packet passes through to reach a destination, by sending probe packets wi…

Circuit Switching vs Packet Switching

Circuit switching reserves a dedicated, fixed-bandwidth path between two endpoints for the entire duration of a session, while packet switching breaks data int…

When Should You Use TCP vs UDP?

Use TCP when correctness and ordered, complete delivery matter more than latency (web pages, file transfers, APIs), and use UDP when low latency and minimal ov…

What is a CDN Edge Node?

A CDN edge node is a server in a content delivery network positioned geographically close to end users that caches and serves content locally, so requests are…

What is Anycast DNS?

Anycast DNS is a routing technique where the same IP address is announced from multiple physically distributed DNS servers, and the internet’s routing infrastr…

What is Caching in System Design?

Caching is storing copies of frequently accessed data in a fast, temporary layer so future requests are served from it instead of the slower original source, r…

What is a CDN (Content Delivery Network)?

A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a geographically distributed network of edge servers that cache and serve content from a location close to each user, reduc…

How to Design a Fraud Detection System

A fraud detection system scores every transaction in real time by combining a low-latency rules engine for known bad patterns with a machine-learning model for…

What is the PACELC Theorem and How Does It Extend CAP?

PACELC extends the CAP theorem by pointing out that even when there is no network partition, a distributed system still has to trade off Latency against Consis…

Strong Consistency vs Eventual Consistency: How Do You Choose?

Strong consistency guarantees that every read returns the most recently written value across all replicas, typically by requiring writes and reads to coordinat…

What is Request Coalescing and How Does It Prevent Cache Stampedes?

Request coalescing is the technique of detecting that multiple concurrent requests are asking for the same uncached (or expired) resource and merging them into…

What Are the Main Data Replication Strategies?

Data replication strategies fall into three broad approaches — synchronous, asynchronous, and semi-synchronous — which trade off consistency, latency, and dura…

What Is Edge Computing Architecture?

Edge computing architecture processes data physically close to where it is generated or consumed — on devices, local gateways, or nearby points of presence — i…

What is Queueing Theory and Why Does It Matter for System Design?

Queueing theory is the mathematical study of waiting lines, and in system design it explains why response latency does not rise linearly with utilization but i…

What is Little’s Law and How Do You Apply It?

Little’s Law states that the average number of requests in a system (L) equals the average arrival rate (lambda) multiplied by the average time each request sp…