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pd43

Is scaling a website about throughput or latency? It's both!

Latency: People don't want to wait for a webpage to load. Studies have shown that increasing the response time of a website decreases usage significantly.

Throughput: The throughput of a website needs to be high enough to sustain all incoming requests. Think about how many requests are sent to Facebook every second. If throughput isn't high enough to handle incoming requests, you will have to drop requests, or buffer them.

rutwikparikh

Kayvon gives an example of how Google increased search results from 10 per page to 30 per page; however, this lead to increased latency resulting in lower website usage. Throughput, in this context, refers to the number of incoming requests that can be handled per second (or other unit of time); websites could drop requests if they do not have sufficiently high throughput compared to the number of incoming requests. Both lower latency and high throughput are essential to ensure site performance.