Optimizing for low latency is a vast topic ranging from operating systems to distributed systems, databases, and more. The chapters in this book serve as starting points for you to learn about the various techniques and understand when to apply them. When you start to apply the optimizations discussed in the book or you want to learn more, the resources identified in this appendix can help you deepen your understanding. Here you’ll find references including books, peer-reviewed articles, and blog posts that will expand your perspective on specific topics of interest.
Chapter 1
Grace Hopper’s use of wires to visualize latency is a great starting point for building intuition around latency. You can find the part of her presentation where she shows wires cut to the exact length of information traveling for a nanosecond at http://dataphys.org/list/grace-hopper-nanoseconds/.
A lot of low-latency work is driven by how humans perceive a good user experience in e-commerce, productivity tools, and many other use cases. If you want to know more about the science of human perception, you should check out the research articles “The Information Visualizer, an Information Workspace” by Stuart Card, George Robertson, and Jock Mackinlay (1991) and “Is 100 Milliseconds Too Fast?” by James Dabrowski and Ethan Munson (2001).