Mouse Latency Test
Measure how responsive your mouse click is. Every click is timestamped twice — once when the browser creates the event, once when this page's handler runs — exposing the delivery delay, while reaction trials time how fast you click when the pad flips.
Click to arm a trial
When the pad flips, click as fast as you can. Every click also logs its event-to-handler delay.
Recent click latency
lower is betterMouse latency is the time between pressing the button and your computer being able to act on the click, measured in milliseconds. Every click travels a short path: the switch closes, firmware debounces the contact to confirm a real press, the report crosses USB or a wireless link, the operating system queues and dispatches an input event, and the browser hands it to the page. Each stage adds a little delay, and together they decide how instant your mouse feels — separately from your own reflexes and from how fast the screen updates.
This test measures two things at once. Every pointer event carries a timeStamp set the moment the browser created it; when the click reaches this page's handler we read performance.now() and subtract, giving the event-to-handler delay — the time the click spent in the input stack and event loop. Separately, the pad runs reaction trials: it waits a random interval, flips state, and records the gap between the flip and your click. The live strip counts pointer-move events per second, mirroring how often the browser is told the cursor moved.
Read the two numbers differently. The reaction-trial figure is dominated by human reaction time — roughly 200–270 ms — with hardware and software latency stacked on top, so treat it as a combined score for comparing attempts, not a hardware measurement. The event-to-handler delay is the cleaner signal: a healthy setup sits in the low single-digit milliseconds, and spikes into the tens mean the page or your system is busy. Consistency matters as much as the average — a mouse swinging between 2 ms and 20 ms feels worse than one pinned steadily at 8 ms.
Typical sources of click delay
| Stage | Typical delay | What it depends on |
|---|---|---|
| Switch debounce | 2–20 ms | Firmware waits for the contact to settle; some gaming mice let you tune it |
| Polling interval | 1–8 ms | A 125 Hz mouse reports every 8 ms at most, a 1000 Hz mouse every 1 ms |
| Wireless link | ~1–15 ms | Good 2.4 GHz dongles are close to wired; Bluetooth adds noticeably more |
| OS input pipeline | 1–5 ms | USB scheduling plus the OS waking, queuing and dispatching the event |
| Browser main thread | 0–10+ ms | What the event-to-handler figure captures; grows when the tab is busy |
Mouse latency vs input lag vs polling rate
These three measure different links in the same chain. Polling rate is how often the mouse reports its position and button state, in hertz — the Mouse Polling Rate Tester estimates it from the spacing of move events. Mouse latency, measured here, is how quickly a click becomes an event the page can handle. Input lag is the full end-to-end delay from your action to a visible change on screen, including the display's own response and refresh — the Input Lag Tester covers that loop. A high polling rate cuts one source of mouse latency, but both also depend on the OS, the browser, and your monitor.
How to lower mouse latency?
- Go wired, or use a quality low-latency 2.4 GHz dongle placed close to the mouse rather than Bluetooth.
- Raise the polling rate in your mouse software (500 or 1000 Hz) if the sensor and link support it steadily.
- Lower the click debounce time in the manufacturer software, balancing it against the risk of double-clicks.
- Plug the mouse straight into the computer rather than through an unpowered hub or a long extension.
- Keep drivers and firmware current, and close background apps that saturate the CPU or USB bus.