Throughput

The volume of work a system can complete in a given time period, such as requests handled per second.

Mental model: Like how many orders a kitchen can complete per hour.

Example: An API that handles 2,000 requests per second at peak load.

In practice: Latency and throughput can trade off against each other — batching requests to boost throughput often adds latency to any individual request in the batch.

• often confused with Latency