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A load test shows p99 latency climbing sharply past 500 concurrent users. How do you work out why?

6 min readUpdated 2026-08-15

Answer

Short answer

Read the throughput curve first: if throughput has flattened while latency rises, you are queueing behind a saturated resource, and the job is to find which one by walking utilisation and saturation from the load generator through the app tier to the database.

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Likely follow-ups

  • Throughput is still rising linearly at 500 users but p99 has doubled. What does that tell you?
  • How would you tell a garbage-collection pause apart from lock contention in the same latency profile?
  • The database CPU is at 40 percent and p99 is 4 seconds. Where do you look next?
  • How do you prove a fix worked rather than moved the bottleneck?

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