Jitter Budgets and Critical Paths
A latency budget assigns time to the dependent stages on a critical path and reserves room for variation, queueing, and failure handling.
Planned model
Compose stage distributions into an end-to-end timeline. Add queueing, parallel branches, pauses, and correlated slow paths while tracking budget violations.
Questions
- Which stages are sequential and which overlap?
- Where does waiting enter the critical path?
- Why do individual p99 values not simply add into an end-to-end p99?
Exercise
Allocate a deadline across receive, parse, decide, validate, encode, and send stages, including explicit jitter reserve.