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Latency

By Pekka Enberg


Learn practical techniques for delivering low latency software

Working on latency-sensitive applications? This book will help you better diagnose latency problems and master the low-latency techniques that have been predominantly “tribal knowledge” until now. You’ll learn a holistic approach, with techniques that intersect many areas of software engineering, distributed systems, databases, and operating systems.

As the author, Pekka Enberg, put it, “This is the book I always wished I had when grappling with latency issues. Although this book focuses on applying the techniques in practice, I also provide enough background to try to balance between theory and practice.”

This ~100-page excerpt covers:

  • Understanding and negotiating caching tradeoffs (latency vs. complexity)
  • Exploring the two main concurrency models (threading and event-driven architecture
  • Identifying and applying parallelization opportunities to improve throughput and reduce latency
  • Applying asynchronous process strategies that reduce perceived latency and improve overall system responsiveness.
Latency by Pekka Enberg

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Latency Pekka book

This book excerpt contains the following 3 chapters: Caching, Concurrency, Asynchronous Processing.

Caching: When to apply caching, the tradeoffs of different caching strategies, and practical tips for working with caching.

Concurrency: How to use parallelism to improve throughput and reduce latency -- plus tips for navigating the concurrency/consistency tradeoff.

Asynchronous Processing: Tricks for hiding latency, managing concurrency, and avoiding asynchronous processing pitfalls.

Hear what readers are saying about Latency

The book covers most of the important topics including partitioning, replication, caching and OS level optimizations. It covers both software and hardware details to understand what contributes to latency and how it can be improved.”
Shubham Patel, Senior Software Engineer, Apple

I miss books like this (well organized and a fair mix of practical examples, analogies and theory). I am looking forward to having a copy on my bookshelf.”
Artur Baruchi, Senior Software Engineer, Heo

I would recommend this book to any junior team member who is not well versed in low latency and curious about basic concepts of such applications.”
Rene Perrin, Director of Software Engineering, CME group

About the Author

Pekka Enberg

Pekka Enberg

Pekka Enberg is the Founder and CTO of Turso and a PhD Candidate in Computer Science at the University of Helsinki. He received his M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Helsinki in 2016. In the past, Pekka has worked on the Apache Cassandra-compatible low-latency, high-throughput distributed database system, ScyllaDB, as well as on the Linux kernel as a contributor and maintainer of SLAB memory allocators and the OSv unikernel, an operating system designed to run efficiently on the cloud. His current research focuses on the intersection of low-latency networked systems and serverless edge computing.