Every provider says its feed is fast. The useful questions are where the time goes, how you would measure it, and whether your audience would notice the difference.
Define the clock before you compare
Latency is the interval between two events, so name them. The honest measure for a reader is from the moment the publisher releases a story to the moment it can be read in your product. Some figures only cover the provider’s own processing, which leaves out the first and last legs of the journey.
Where the time goes
- Collection: a feed that is polled every minute adds up to a minute before anything else happens.
- Processing: parsing, normalizing, and tagging each story.
- Entitlement checks: deciding which recipients may receive it.
- Transport: the network path to you, and whether you are pushed to or must poll.
- Your side: queues, indexing, and caches between arrival and display.
Push beats poll
The largest savings rarely come from faster servers. They come from removing waiting. A publisher that pushes stories the instant they are released, to a service that pushes them on to you, removes two polling intervals from the chain. That alone can be the difference between two seconds and two minutes.
Measure it yourself
Keep the publisher’s release timestamp with each story and record your own arrival time. The difference, tracked as a median and as a slow tail, tells you more than an average. The tail matters because the delayed stories are often the large ones, arriving while systems are busiest.
When it matters, and when it does not
Markets react to news in moments, so financial users pay for every second removed. A trade website or an intranet does not need that. For those audiences, completeness, accurate tagging, and clean formatting are worth more than shaving seconds. Spend where your readers would feel it.
