In a simple term, response time is the time taken by any application or software to respond any request of the user.
There are various types of terms are used which are related to response time:-
Absolute Response Time:- As shown in the above picture, it is the exact same as (time of response noticed by user – time of request done by the user). But it’s on the user side. That means, suppose the user clicks on a link, now that request goes to the server. And then the server responds back to the user. And that response will be noticed by the user. Absolute Response time is this time gap.
Server Processing Time:- This is the time taken by the server to process the request made by the user and generate the required output.
Network Latency:- This is the time taken by the data packet to travel from user to application server and from application server to the user server. This does not include the server processing time and the absolute response time, as mentioned above.
In the below mentioned post, different types of Response Time Graph is mentioned in a very elaborative way.