TTFT vs ITL: Splitting LLM Latency Metrics That Matter

October 19, 2026

A slow LLM feature is almost never uniformly slow, and treating it as one number guarantees a bad diagnosis. Time to first token (TTFT) is how long the user waits before the first word appears; inter-token latency (ITL) is the cadence of every word after that. They have different causes, …