Pushtime

Pushtime is a term used in information technology to describe the time required for a data push to complete from initiation to successful delivery or propagation. It encompasses network latency, processing time on sending and receiving systems, queuing delays, and acknowledgment or retry behavior.

Common contexts include push notification systems, where pushtime measures end-to-end latency from issuing a notification to its arrival on a device; data replication and synchronization, where it denotes the delay for a change to be propagated to all replicas; and software deployment pipelines, where it can mean the time from triggering a deployment to the update being visible in production.

Measurement and interpretation: Pushtime is typically reported in milliseconds or seconds and is an end-to-end metric. It is often captured with tracing, logging, or dedicated monitoring tools that record timestamps at push initiation, at delivery, and at acknowledgment. Analysts distinguish factors such as network path, gateway processing, and client-side reception when diagnosing pushtime.

Variability: Pushtime can vary with traffic load, device or client type, and regional routing. Organizations may track percentile-based pushtime (p95 or p99) to understand worst-case performance. It is related to but not identical with related concepts such as latency, throughput, and delivery success rate.

Etymology and usage: The term is informal and not standardized in formal literature; its precise meaning is defined by context within an organization or project.