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Understanding Latency Percentiles: Why p95 and p99 Matter More Than Average Response Time
When monitoring application performance, many dashboards display the average response time. While this seems useful, averages can be misleading because they often hide slow requests that negatively impact real users. Why Average Response Time Isn't Enough Imagine your application processes 100 requests: * 99 requests complete in 20 ms * 1 request takes 5,000 ms The average response time is only 69.8 ms, which appears healthy. However, one user still waited 5 seconds, resulting in a poor e
Published on
2026-07-22