[Bloat] [EXTERNAL] Re: Terminology for Laypeople

[Jonathan Morton]

> On 13 May, 2021, at 12:10 am, Michael Richardson <mcr at sandelman.ca> wrote:
> 
> But, I'm looking for terminology that I can use with my mother-in-law.

Here's a slide I used a while ago, which seems to be relevant here:



The important thing about the term "quick" in this context is that throughput capacity can contribute to it in some circumstances, but is mostly irrelevant in others.  For small requests, throughput is irrelevant and quickness is a direct result of low latency.

For a grandmother-friendly analogy, consider what you'd do if you wanted milk for your breakfast cereal, but found the fridge was empty.  The ideal solution to this problem would be to walk down the road to the village shop and buy a bottle of milk, then walk back home.  That might take about ten minutes - reasonably "quick".  It might take twice that long if you have to wait for someone who wants to scratch off a dozen lottery tickets right at the counter while paying by cheque; it's politer for such people to step out of the way.

My village doesn't have a shop, so that's not an option.  But I've seen dairy tankers going along the main road, so I could consider flagging one of them down.  Most of them ignore the lunatic trying to do that, and the one that does (five hours later) decides to offload a thousand gallons of milk instead of the pint I actually wanted, to make it worth his while.  That made rather a mess of my kitchen and was quite expensive.  Dairy tankers are set up for "fast" transport of milk - high throughput, not optimised for latency.

The non-lunatic alternative would be to get on my bicycle and go to the supermarket in town.  That takes about two hours, there and back.  It takes me basically the same amount of time to fetch that one bottle of milk as it would to conduct a full shopping trip, and I can't reduce that time at all without upgrading to something faster than a bicycle, or moving house to somewhere closer to town.  That's latency for you.

 - Jonathan Morton
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