Since the primary contributing factor to propagation delay is distance, whenever dealing with network latency, one should mostly be concerned with distance. The difference between transmission of the first and last byte in a packet is the transmission or serialization delay. This is infinitesimal with a small packet on a high bandwidth backbone link 10G or G , but could add hundreds of milliseconds for a large packet on a low bandwidth link.
During its journey, data passes through various controllers, routers and switches that help it reach its destination. Each one of these gateway nodes is responsible for a different task in figuring out what to do with the data. With the advent of software defined wide area networking SD-WAN , the routing of data can take a minimal amount of time. For example, an SD-WAN controller can constantly monitor each available path and dynamically choose the least congested available to route data most efficiently.
Routing and switching delay is infinitesimal. The main delay through routers and switches is the queuing delay. Packet latency is dependent on the physical distance that data must travel through cords, networks and the like to reach its destination. Throughput is the volume of data that can be transferred over a specified time period. Low latency and low bandwidth means that throughput will also be low. This means that while data packets should technically be delivered without delay, a low bandwidth means there can still be considerable congestion.
But with high bandwidth, low latency, then throughput will be greater and the connection much more efficient. Now that we have determined the meaning of global latency and its effects on smooth communications, the following describes two other examples of the effects of latency. In the case of fiber optic networks, latency refers to the time delay that affects light as it travels through the fiber optic network.
Latency increases over the distance traveled, so this must also be factored in to compute the latency for any fiber optic route.
Light travels slower in a cable which means the latency of light traveling in a fibre optic cable is around 4. The quality of fiber optic cable is an important factor in reducing latency in a network. The reasons behind audio latency are based on the speed of sound.
Latency in VoIP is the difference in time between when a voice packet is transmitted and the moment it reaches its destination.
A latency of 20 ms is normal for VoIP calls; a latency of up to ms is barely noticeable and therefore acceptable. Any higher than that, however, and quality starts to diminish. At ms or higher, it becomes completely unacceptable. Insufficient bandwidth — with a slow internet connection, insufficient bandwidth means that data packets take more time reach their destination, and often arrive in the wrong order. Firewall blocking traffic — to prevent bottlenecks, always allow clearance for your VoIP applications within your firewall software.
Wrong codecs — codecs encode voice signals into digital data ready to be transmitted. This is often an issue that your provider needs to solve, however some VoIP apps allow you to tweak codecs. Outdated hardware — Sometimes the mix of old hardware and new software can cause latency problems. Changing your telephone adaptor or other VoIP-specific software can help.
Even your headset can cause latency. Signal conversion — If your system is converting your signal to or from analog and digital, this could cause latency. The slowing of your network can be extremely problematic in the business world, where time is such a precious commodity. As your network grows bigger, having additional connections means more points where delays and issues can happen. Problems can increase again as more and more organizations connect to cloud servers, use more applications and expand to accommodate remote workers extra branch offices.
Everyone has experienced latency in various aspects of daily business, and it can severely threaten deadlines, expected outcomes and eventually ROI. This is where comprehensive network monitoring and troubleshooting comes into its own.
Network monitoring and troubleshooting can quickly and accurately diagnose and identify the root causes of latency and put solutions in place to reduce and improve the problem. Before you can do anything to improve your network latency, you need to know how to calculate and measure it. If you feel that your network is running slow, you can check your latency manually by using Windows. Add up all the measurements, and the resulting quantity is the latency between your machine and the website in question.
Then, check application performance to determine whether applications are acting unexpectedly and potentially placing pressure on the network. Subnetting is another way to help reduce latency across your network, by grouping together endpoints that communicate most frequently with each other.
However, regardless of what you choose, make sure to keep all records in the same test category. RTT is perhaps the most popular metric involved in measuring network latency and it is measured in milliseconds ms. There are two types of monitoring approaches that will help improve network latency: synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring.
Synthetic monitoring tools such as Sematext Synthetics will let run artificial hence the name synthetic calls to your APIs and watch for any increase in latency or performance degradation. However, synthetic transactions are not going to show you how your users are using your services and what their experience is. But real user monitoring , RUM or end user experience monitoring, is.
In the past few years, the popularity of real user monitoring tools grew exponentially as a by-product of the increased number of companies that took their services and products globally. An ever-growing need to monitor and understand user behavior led to a lot of monitoring companies switching from just monitoring server resources to looking at how users experience the website.
This is where Sematext Experience comes into play. The advanced dashboard dedicated to Page Loads, allows you to see all the details on what causes latency and provides a breakdown by each category, from DNS and server processing time to how long does the render takes.
From this, you can extrapolate where your weak spots are and what areas you need to prioritize. Besides providing key information on how the website is performing across different locations, it will also provide intel on how the website loads on different devices running at different connection speeds.
With tools like Sematext, troubleshooting network latency issues is going to be a breeze. You need to set up what we call monitors, that will run specific tests on an endpoint, resource, or website to test against a predefined set of values. If the test fails, you get alerted and can jump in and figure out what affects the latency by looking at the error log. Sematext Synthetics will let you automate calls to your services and APIs to ensure you are always on the lookout for latency degradation so that you can jump in front of the issue before your users get to experience it.
Once you have passed the signup, you have to create a Synthetic app. You must give it a name and set an interval for your tests as well as picking a location from where you want the tests to run. You need to spend time to understand what each metric represents in order to keep a close eye on the ones that are relevant to your users and could have affected network latency.
You can click the link you got in the message or go to your monitors and click on the failed run. This is where you get all the information related to the issue that caused network latency and will help you dig to the core of the problem in no time.
Latency is always going to influence how your website performs but with the proper tooling, you can mitigate its impact by addressing the main issues causing the latency in the first place.
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