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DevOps & Automation · Intermediate

Percentile Latency

A latency measure, such as p95 or p99, indicating the value below which a given percentage of requests fall.

Definition

Percentiles reveal tail latency hidden by averages; p99 = 400 ms means 1% of requests take longer than 400 ms. SLOs are commonly defined on high percentiles because users experience the slow tail.

Example

An API has an average latency of 80 ms but p99 of 2 s due to cold caches.

Exam tip

Averages hide outliers; exams prefer percentile-based latency SLIs.

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