Debouncing, in the context of programming, means to discard operations that occur too close together during a specific interval, and consolidate them into a single invocation.
Debouncing is very similar to throttling. The key difference is that throttling enforces limits on continuous operations, while debouncing waits for invocations to stop for a specific time to consolidate many noisy invocations into one single invocation.
A typical use case of debouncing is when responding to user input. When the user is typing, no other action should be taken to avoid the UI becoming laggy. When the user pauses typing, we can start processing the input, such as filtering results, giving suggestions, etc. If the function search is debounced by 10 milliseconds, it means:
The first call to search is known as the leading edge. For every next call to search , if it is within 10 milliseconds from the previous call, it is in the same "batch" as the previous call. After 10 milliseconds have elapsed from the last call to search , if no other calls have happened, we have reached the trailing edge.