I recently heard Stuart Cheshire (sort of tongue-in-cheek) refer to “idle 
latency” as “the latency that users experience when they are not using their 
internet connection” (or something along those lines).

I think terminology that reinforces that the baseline (unloaded) latency is not 
always what users experience, and that latency under load is not referring to 
some unusual corner-case situation, is good.  So, I like “idle latency” and 
“working latency”.

-Greg



From: Bloat <bloat-boun...@lists.bufferbloat.net> on behalf of Jonathan Foulkes 
<j...@jonathanfoulkes.com>
Date: Monday, May 10, 2021 at 2:10 PM
To: Jason Livingood <jason_living...@comcast.com>
Cc: bloat <bloat@lists.bufferbloat.net>
Subject: Re: [Bloat] Terminology for Laypeople

Hi Jason,

I’ve found that idle is a good descriptor for unloaded metrics, and for 
semi-technical audiences ‘working’ is a very good term. But for lay people, the 
term ‘loaded’ seems to work better, especially since we are talking about a 
metric that relates to capacity.

e.g.

When my truck is unloaded, my truck stops quickly, but when loaded, it takes 
longer to stop.

so now:

When my Internet line is unloaded, my latency is low, but when it is highly 
loaded (iCloud photo sync), the latency is very high.

Cheers,

Jonathan Foulkes



On May 4, 2021, at 8:02 PM, Livingood, Jason via Bloat 
<bloat@lists.bufferbloat.net<mailto:bloat@lists.bufferbloat.net>> wrote:

Like many of you I have been immersed in buffer bloat discussions for many 
years, almost entirely within the technical community. Now that I am starting 
to explain latency & latency under load to internal non-technical folks, I have 
noticed some people don’t really understand “traditional” latency vs. latency 
under load (LUL).

As a result, I am planning to experiment in some upcoming briefings and call 
traditional latency “idle latency” – a measure of latency conducted on an 
otherwise idle connection. And then try calling LUL either “active latency” or 
perhaps “working latency” (suggested by an external colleague – can’t take 
credit for that one) – to try to communicate it is latency when the connection 
is experiencing normal usage.

Have any of you here faced similar challenges explaining this to non-technical 
audiences? Have you had any success with alternative terms? What do you think 
of these?

Thanks for any input,
Jason
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