welcome

The need for low latency is pervasive across a variety of use cases, ranging from e-commerce, productivity apps, content sites, and more, but it can be hard to find resources on how to optimize for low latency because many of the techniques and tools are part of developer folklore. Furthermore, optimizing for low latency requires a holistic approach, which means the techniques intersect many areas of software engineering, distributed systems, databases, operating systems, and more, which can make the topic hard to grasp.

If you are working on an application or a system and need to know how to make it respond faster to give a better user experience or have other stringent latency requirements, this is the book for you. All you need is some background in working on backend code and databases, although many topics are relevant if you're working on the front end. The aim is to give you a good understanding of what latency is and is not, how to model and measure it, but also provide a set of techniques to optimize for low latency.