Glossary

In general, the period of time that one component in a system is waiting for another component to finish and therefore, is wasted time.
(1) In accessing data on a disk, latency is defined as the time it takes to position the proper sector under the read/write head.
(2) In networking, the amount of time it takes a packet to travel from source to destination. Together, latency and bandwidth define the speed and capacity of a network.