# content
> *Seed placeholder — replace with actual essay before publishing.*

Latency measures how long a single request takes. Throughput measures how many requests finish per second. They are different numbers, and they do not always move together. Adding workers raises throughput; it does nothing for the time one car needs to cross the bridge. The interaction between them under load is where most production performance bugs live.

This piece is a small machine for keeping them straight.

# summary
Two numbers engineers conflate every day, and a small machine for telling them apart.