A latency reconfiguration mechanism in a streams manager detects latency mismatches in a streaming application that affect the performance of the streaming application, and reconfigures the streaming application to minimize the latency mismatches. The reconfiguration can include fusing adjacent processing elements into a single processing element, co-locating adjacent processing elements on the same machine, moving processing elements and/or network links, adding parallel processing elements, and rearranging processing elements and/or network links to create more consistent latency paths. By minimizing latency mismatches and providing more consistent latency paths, the performance of a streaming application is increased by not having to perform significant reordering of data tuples.