Latency Benchmarking

Latency benchmarking measures the time between sending a request to a model and receiving a complete response — typically reported as time-to-first-token (how fast the response starts) and total generation time. These metrics matter enormously for user experience: even a highly accurate model feels broken if it takes ten seconds to respond. Different deployment contexts have different tolerances; a background document summarization task can afford more latency than a real-time chat interface. For behavior architects, latency benchmarking is a reminder that quality isn’t just about what the model says — it’s also about when it says it, and under what load conditions the response time remains acceptable.