Probably not required, but understanding the concept of a statistical distribution has come in handy many times for me when trying to improve the latency of sys

Probably not required, but understanding the concept of a statistical distribution has come in handy many times for me when trying to improve the latency of systems. If you are unaware of distributions, you might measure latency multiple times and then calculate something like a mean or median. When thinking in terms of distributions you are more likely to draw something like https://matthiaslee.com/content/images/2017/05/bimodal_dist.png https://matthiaslee.com/content/images/2017/05/bimodal_dist.... which contains much more information. That example tells you that you have at least two different kinds of latency. It could be 2 different use cases, 2 times of day, cache hit vs. cache miss, etc. It's enlightening to know that there are multiple factors and how much they differ!