Penguin
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Latency is how long something takes to happen, so obviously the shorter this is the better. The Low Latency patches (IIRC) go through the kernel and find a lot of the times where the kernel is busy doing something for a long time and let other processes run. This is important so that sound doesn't skip.

In networking, ping(8) is often the utility used to check latency. You often hear gamers talking about "ping times" and wanting them to be very low, or more importantly for them not to change (which is called Jitter?)