logoalt Hacker News

penteracttoday at 10:42 AM0 repliesview on HN

This is the same calculation behind the observation "you spend much longer in front of red traffic lights than green ones".

It's an interesting observation, but it's playing games with the meaning of "mean latency" and I'm not sure this is a very helpful way to look at requests to a web service - slightly slowing the fastest responses to requests would improve your time-weighted mean latency.

It's a better metric for looking at outages - instantaneous outages don't affect anyone, and time-weighting correctly discards them. On the other hand, average outage length is a very suspect and gameable metric unless accompanied by uptime %.