Performance Comparison Between Apache Pulsar and Kafka: Latency

Apache Pulsar provides consistent publishing latency over time, while Kafka shows periodic spikes where publishing latency jumps from single digits to over 100 ms. Increasing the number of partitions lowers the publishing latency for Pulsar but has the opposite effect for Kafka. For end-to-end latency, Kafka beats Pulsar at the lowest partition count, but as the number of partitions increases, Pulsar's average end-to-end latency decreases while Kafka's increases. When both systems are flushing to disk, Pulsar is clearly better in terms of latency performance. ```