When you measure latency, you’re measuring it based on requests. So in some bucket if you had a request take 2s and a request take 10s, you would say the average is 6s. This answers the question “how long should I expect a single request to take”.

But the articles point is that to the people - it’s not the number of requests that matters - it’s how often they are waiting for them. The question is “how much time am I sitting here waiting?” In that case the 10s request is 5x worse than a 2s request - it takes 5x of the “time spent”.

So you can change the weighing to 1 / 2 2s 1 / 2 10s to 1 * 2/12 & 1 * 10/12 - that gives us 17% and 83%. And the average there is 9.04s.

The difference is the question. If you think about it as road segments, let’s say you have a group of road segments with different lengths. You can ask the “average length of segment” - or you can ask “if you pick a random point among all the segments, how long is the segment that I landed in?” You’re picking very differently there - the second is proportional to the length!

Technically IMO the blog is slightly off - you want to use “mean residual life”. Ie if I pick a random TIME how long do I have to wait for my request to finish. But it’s reasonably close.