Apples HLS spec for client says that client will play the 3rd last segment in the playlist. So you are bound to get the latency of 3*media-file-duration. In FMS, we set media file duration to be 8000 ms (8 sec).. You can try to reduce it to 4000 or 2000 ..in either httpd.conf, or event.xml, application.xml

However, you may read http://knowfms.wordpress.com/2011/09/22/best-practices-for-setting-ios -media-file-duration/ for knowing the implications (pros-cons) of this..

No its not same - it needs to same or multiple of FragmentDuration. I think article which Nitin has pointed out in his previous post should help you understand things better,

Just request the m3u8 from browser and download it.. This is plan text file. Just check that your target duration is set to 2 after the httpd.conf change. If not, you have either not restarted the apache server after the change or Event.xml or Application.xml is overridign this vlaue..

Regarding delay.. I am not sure you can get better than this on Http streaming.. I hope you read the article and understands why all Http streaming protocols suffers from delay..

In httpd.conf , you can edit HLSMediaFileDuration .. it is specified in milliseconds

<Location /hls-live>

    HLSHttpStreamingEnabled true

    HttpStreamingLiveEventPath "../applications"

    HttpStreamingContentPath "../applications"

    HLSMediaFileDuration 8000

    HLSSlidingWindowLength 6

    HLSFmsDirPath ".."

    HLSM3U8MaxAge 2

    HLSTSSegmentMaxAge -1

    Options -Indexes FollowSymLinks

</Location>

In Event.xml

You can add

<Recording>

</Recording>

<HLS>

       <MediaFileDuration>2000</MediaFileDuration>

</HLS>

<HLS> tag has to be sibling tag of the <Recording>

Same applies to Application.xml

Read Application-level and event-level configurations for live HLS @ http://help.adobe.com/en_US/flashmediaserver/devguide/WSeb6b7485f9649b f23d103e5512e08f3a338-8000.html#WS8c0554f47ab8e40d-323660bc131f49feddc -7fff

Yes you are right in your assumptions.