jargon

Backend & systems·Scaling and load management

you measure how many requests the system finishes per second, which is a different question from how long any one of them takes.

Throughput

Also calledrequests per second, RPS, QPS

Completed work per unit time. It is the capacity number, and it trades against latency: batching, queueing and parallelism raise throughput while making individual requests slower. A system can have excellent throughput and unusable latency, which is why quoting one without the other means nothing.

Commonly confused with