Free Latency Budget calculator with clear step-by-step results.
Decomposes a latency target into the parts you cannot change and the part you can. Network round trip and per-hop overhead are structural, database time scales with call count, and what remains is the compute budget every service in the chain has to share - which is often alarmingly small.
Consumed budget
Consumed = network RTT + hops x per-hop overhead + queries x per-query latency
Remaining compute
Remaining = target p99 - consumed
The target is unreachable with this architecture. The usual fixes are cutting service hops, batching or caching database calls, or moving compute closer to the user.
Because they multiply. Six calls at 12 ms is 72 ms; batching them into one round trip typically costs 15-20 ms total, which is often the single largest available saving.