What is p99, p95, p50 Latency? | How Razorpay handles burst traffic? | Smart Routing | Tech Primers

[@nprateek]

Median latency is not calculated by average, infact its just 50th percentile latency

[@omkar.at.office]

Awesome! May be a coincidence, today only I came across a fact that every 100ms increase in response time reduces Amazon sales by 1%. That explains how important is response time of APIs. Trying to improve p99 seems to be costly in many cases. But it is worth knowing and setting expectations to customers through specific response time SLA. I am bit confused between mean and median. Is mean for average and median for sorted distribution of response times? Thanks.

[@TechPrimers]

Actually median latency is a confusing term with mean. There is nothing called as mean latency since median latency gives the average. Usually ppl don’t consider median latency as a metric. Instead they use only P99,95,50. Found an interesting article which bashes median latency - news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11607144

[@omkar.at.office]

@@TechPrimers Thanks!

[@yatri6329]

Hi, i am working as a software engineer in TCS 5 yr of experience i work on Microservices architecture but the deployment and all are handled by other companies team which i am not aware mostly i do is to to big fixed and CR on existing code. I am preparing for product based company i almost done with DSA part but when it comes to system design and LLD all those idea i have is only theory. All the HLD part is 110% theory only. can u suggest me what should I do which company i should Target. Thanks

[@TechPrimers]

Hi Yatri, System Design is conceptual most of the time. There is no silver bullet to master System Design. You will have to go through multiple usecases, understand the trade offs and take a decisions based on the requirements. If you have backing reason on why you chose a tech stack, you will succeed in your System design questionnaire. Read a lot of blogs from the companies themselves. You need to be convinced why one tool is better over another and when. All the best.