Round-Trip Time (RTT)
How long a packet takes to reach a destination and return - the floor under any request-and-response interaction.
Round-trip time is the interval between sending a packet and receiving the response, and it is the hard floor under every interaction that requires an answer. It is set mostly by distance and by the number of networks in between, which is why it is measured in tens of milliseconds within a region and in hundreds across an ocean. No amount of server-side optimization moves it, because the constraint is the speed of light in glass plus the routers along the way.
It compounds where a protocol needs several exchanges before real data flows: a connection handshake, then a TLS negotiation, then the request itself, each costing at least one RTT. That is the practical case for a long-lived connection over repeated polling - a streaming API pays the handshake once, while a client that reconnects every few seconds pays it forever - and it is why edge computing attacks the distance rather than the software.
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