Latency
The delay between a request and its response, a critical measure for live betting, real-time wallets and live casino where small delays affect fairness and experience.
Definition
Latency is the time it takes for a message to travel from sender to receiver and back, usually measured in milliseconds. In iGaming it matters in several places: seamless wallet calls on every bet, the game launch handshake, live in-play betting where odds and events change second to second, and live casino video and bet-placement windows. High or unpredictable latency degrades the experience, with slow spins and laggy video, and can create fairness and integrity issues, for example if some players could act on stale odds. Operators reduce latency with geographically distributed infrastructure, content delivery networks, efficient APIs and monitoring, and they design timeouts and idempotency to cope when latency spikes cause retries.
Worked example
In in-play football betting, a goal must suspend the relevant markets almost instantly; if the odds feed and bet-placement path have high latency, a bet could be accepted at odds that no longer reflect the live score, which trading systems guard against with fast suspension and latency checks.
Why it matters
For learners, it explains why speed matters and why a laggy connection can spoil live play. For professionals, latency is a first-order concern for live products and real-time wallets, tied directly to fairness, disputes and user experience, so it is measured, budgeted and defended in service level agreements.