Looking through the Eye of the Mouse: A Simple Method for Measuring End-to-end Latency using an Optical Mouse

We present a simple method for measuring end-to-end latency in graphical user interfaces. The method works with most optical mice and allows accurate and real time latency measures up to 5 times per second. In addition, the technique allows easy insertion of probes at different places in the system I.e. mouse events listeners - to investigate the sources of latency. After presenting the measurement method and our methodology, we detail the measures we performed on different systems, toolkits and applications. Results show that latency is affected by the operating system and system load. Substantial differences are found between C++/GLUT and C++/Qt or Java/Swing implementations, as well as between web browsers.