Imagine you're at a popular new fast-food joint. You walk up to the counter and place your order.

• Latency is the time you personally wait from placing your order to getting your burger in hand. It's about how fast the system responds to a single request.
• Throughput is the number of total burgers the kitchen can produce and serve per hour. It’s a measure of how much work the system can handle over time.

These two metrics are the yin and yang of system performance. While latency captures the responsiveness of individual operations, throughput reflects the system's capacity under load.

Let's dive into them in more detail:

1. Latency