11.1. A Latency-Sensitive Application

In this chapter, we investigate an application that is sensitive to slow latency. Latency can be thought of as the time it takes for an application to respond to different external or internal events. An application with a latency performance problem often does not hog the CPU for long periods of time; instead, it only uses a small amount of CPU time to respond to different events. However, the response to the particular events is not swift enough. When fixing a latency performance problem, we need to reduce the latency in response to the various events and figure out what parts of the application are slowing down the response. As you will see, tracking down a latency problem requires a slightly different tactic than tracking down a CPU-intensive problem.