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Throughput, Latency, and Pipelines: Diagnosis Of A Fallacy

Source here . Latency is the time it takes for a job to complete from start to finish -- for example, if we're downloading a file from a server, we might define the latency of the download as the amount of time it takes from the initial request for the file to the time the last byte is received. Throughput is a measure of how much can be completed in a given time.  Following the same example, how many files could we download in an hour? What is the relationship between latency and throughput?   It make take, again, 1 hour to download a file.  Notice already that we have a relationship between some amount of work that can be completed and time -- if the file is, say, 2 GB, it takes 1 hour to download 2 GB in our example.  What we really want to do here is generalize: how long does it take to download 10 GB?  How many GB can we download in ten hours or one minute?  Generalizing over time, we derive latency; generalizing over work completed, we derive the...