Evaluating Gateway Latency Overhead

Adding a hop in your LLM request path inevitably adds latency. But how much? And is it worth the trade-off for observability, routing, and caching?

The Latency Cost of Routing

In our tests, SpiderGate adds roughly ~12ms of overhead per request. This comes from payload validation, token counting, and policy enforcement.

Net-Negative Latency

Despite the 12ms overhead, SpiderGate often achieves net-negative latency through semantic caching. By caching common requests at the edge, we bypass the provider entirely, turning a 2,000ms response into a 30ms response.