Glossary
Latency Budget
The maximum acceptable time allocation for an AI agent to complete a request, distributed across processing stages and dependencies.
What is Latency Budget?
Latency budgets define acceptable response times and allocate time across system components like authentication, retrieval, model inference, and post-processing. Setting budgets involves understanding user expectations, technical constraints, and business requirements. Each component receives a portion of the total budget, with monitoring ensuring components stay within allocations.
Budgets enable teams to identify latency bottlenecks and prioritize optimization efforts on components consuming disproportionate time. Exceeding budgets triggers alerts or fallback behaviors like returning partial results, using faster alternatives, or timing out gracefully. Budgets should account for percentiles, not just averages, since tail latency significantly impacts user experience.
Example
A research agent has a 3-second latency budget: 200ms for authentication and routing, 500ms for query parsing and intent detection, 1800ms for retrieval and model inference, 400ms for formatting and response delivery, and 100ms buffer for variance. When retrieval consistently exceeds 500ms, the team optimizes indexing to stay within budget.
How Signet addresses this
Signet's Reliability dimension evaluates latency performance against stated budgets or industry standards. Agents consistently meeting latency budgets score higher in reliability, as predictable response times indicate operational maturity and good architecture.
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