preface

Over the years, I’ve worked on many latency-related problems, and I’ve often had to figure things out on the fly, first identifying where the latency was coming from and then figuring out how to fix it. There’s plenty of useful information scattered across the internet in blog posts, mailing lists, and forum discussions, but I never had a comprehensive resource to turn to when designing and optimizing for low latency. The existing performance books, while excellent, focus on making programs run faster by reducing CPU usage or improving algorithmic efficiency. They miss the bigger picture of latency optimization techniques like colocation, replication strategies, and wait-free synchronization, which can have a far more dramatic impact on response times.