Understanding Tail Latency at Scale in Web Services

Improvements in internet connectivity and warehouse-scale computing have enabled responsive web services, but minimizing latency variability remains a challenge. Various factors contribute to latency variability, such as shared resources, daemons, global resource sharing, maintenance activities, queueing, CPU power throttling, and SSD garbage collection. Techniques to reduce component-level latency variability include differentiating service classes, implementing higher-level queuing, reducing head-of-line blocking, and managing background activities. To address latency variability in large-scale systems, tail-tolerant techniques are crucial, focusing on immediate response methods within requests and cross-request strategies to handle temporary latency variations effectively.

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