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Testing / Apache JMeter Interview questions

What is the difference between Response Time and Latency in JMeter?

Latency, in JMeter's terminology, is the time from when the request is sent until the first byte of the response is received - it primarily reflects how long the server took to start responding, including network travel time to reach it.

Response Time (often labeled "Elapsed Time" in JMeter's data) is the total time from sending the request until the entire response has been fully received, so it includes latency plus the time spent actually transferring the full response body.

This distinction matters for diagnosis: a request with low latency but high overall response time suggests the server responded quickly but the response itself is large or the connection is slow to transfer it, while high latency specifically points at server-side processing or network delay before the response even begins.

Latency measures the time until:
Low latency combined with high overall response time suggests:

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