I spent forty-eight hours arguing with an API that was not actually slow on the wire. My Python probe kept printing extra delay, while a single curl call still looked almost instant. Have you ever trusted a client-side timer and then shipped a performance scare that never existed upstream? The disagreement showed up during a quiet check, not during an incident bridge or a customer ticket. I had a tiny loop hitting the same health URL and printing elapsed time after every response. curl made t...