"Average latency is a lie. Your users experience your worst-case performance, not your best-case."
Every infrastructure provider talks about their P50 latency—the median response time. It's a flattering number. It hides the truth. What actually matters is P99: the latency that 1% of your users experience. Because that 1% is still thousands of users, and for them, your service is broken.
Imagine a system with 100ms P50 and 2000ms P99. Half your users get a snappy 100ms experience. But 1 in 100 requests takes two full seconds. If your user makes 50 requests per session, they'll hit that 2-second delay almost every session. Their perception of your product is defined by the worst moments, not the best.
Optimizing P99 is hard. P50 is easy—just make the common case fast. P99 requires eliminating every edge case, every resource contention, every garbage collection pause. It requires discipline that most teams don't have.
Tail latency comes from predictable sources:
We engineer for P99, not P50. Our architecture eliminates the common causes of tail latency. The result: consistent performance where your worst request is almost as fast as your best.
When evaluating AI infrastructure, ask for P99 latency, not P50. Ask for latency histograms, not averages. The vendors who optimize for consistency will show you these numbers proudly. The ones hiding behind averages have something to hide.
Consistency beats peaks. Every time.