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Networking & Telecommunications vocabulary · Bandwidth, Latency and Reliability

Bottleneck

Meaning in networking & telecommunications, with examples

/ˈbɒtlnek/nounCommon term

In networking & telecommunications, bottleneck means: The point in a network or system where capacity is lowest, so it limits the speed of everything that passes through it, like the narrow neck of a bottle.

In Turkish: darboğaz

How it is used

Used in performance analysis and capacity planning. Engineers identify, find and remove bottlenecks; once one is fixed, the next slowest part becomes the new bottleneck. Common bottlenecks are WAN links, firewalls and old switches.

Example sentences

  1. The firewall is the bottleneck: its CPU hits 100% whenever traffic goes above 2 Gbps.

  2. Upgrading the server links won't help if the WAN is the real bottleneck.

Common collocations

  • performance bottleneck
  • identify a bottleneck
  • network bottleneck
  • remove a bottleneck
  • bandwidthThe maximum amount of data a connection can carry in a given time, usually measured in megabits or gigabits per second (Mbps, Gbps).
  • throughputThe amount of data that actually gets through a connection in a given time, which is usually lower than the bandwidth because of overhead, errors and congestion.
  • congestionA situation in which more traffic is trying to cross a link or device than it can handle, so packets are queued or dropped and everything slows down.
  • latencyThe time it takes for data to travel from one point of a network to another, usually measured in milliseconds; lower latency means a faster response.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Bandwidth, Latency and Reliability

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