How do you calculate total latency?

So, how do you figure out total latency? It’s simpler than you might think, at least in theory! You just, like, subtract the start time from the end time, right? Simple! If I hit send on an email at, say, 10:37 AM and it shows up in my friend’s inbox at 10:37:05 AM, that’s eight seconds of latency. Seems pretty straightforward. Eight whole seconds! My goodness.

But that’s just one email. One tiny data point. Remember that time I tried to upload a video to YouTube? Took, like, forever. Then there was that one time I was playing an online game and lag happened. Seriously frustrating. So just using one measurement? That’s crazy. It’s not exactly realistic, is it? You need more data, tons more! You know, you should probably run that test multiple times—at least a few dozen if you want reasonably reliable results. Then, yeah, you average it all out. That’s when you get a real picture of the overall latency. It helps to smooth out the weird spikes caused by, well, life. Network hiccups, slow servers, that annoying neighbor hogging the bandwidth…you name it. Averaging gives you a much better idea of what’s really going on. I mean, otherwise, one bad connection could skew everything! It’s just a better reflection of reality, you know?