What is Latency?

Latency is the largest cause of slow Web applications over the WAN or internet. Latency describes the time delay experienced while a data packet moves from one point to another, usually caused by physical distance and high round-trip times. Latency can also be introduced by compute-intensive processing such as SSL handshaking, bulk encryption/decryption, and TCP session management.

Along with network congestion, jitter, and packet loss, latency can have a profound effect on application performance -- even over networks with abundant bandwidth.

The F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)™ addresses latency-inducing processes by offloading them from servers onto a hardware-accelerated platform and by optimizing transport-layer protocols.

F5 products that support WAN Acceleration: BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM)