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Software Engineering vocabulary · Release and Maintenance

Bottleneck

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

/ˈbɑːtəlnɛk/nounCore term

In software engineering, bottleneck means: The one slowest or most limited part of a system, such as the database or the network, that holds back the performance of everything else.

In Turkish: darboğaz

How it is used

Teams 'find', 'hit' and 'remove' bottlenecks. Fixing one bottleneck often reveals the next one. Load tests and tracing are common ways to find them. The word is also used for people and processes.

Example sentences

  1. Adding more web servers didn't help, because the database was the real bottleneck.

  2. The load test showed a bottleneck in the image service at 800 requests per second.

Common collocations

  • performance bottleneck
  • find the bottleneck
  • remove a bottleneck
  • become a bottleneck
  • throughputThe amount of work a system completes in a given time, for example requests per second, messages per minute or megabytes per second.
  • latencyThe time a request or piece of data takes to travel through a system and get a response, usually measured in milliseconds.
  • scale upTo handle more load by giving one machine more power, such as more CPU or memory, instead of adding more machines.
  • tracingFollowing a single request as it passes through many services, recording how long each step takes, so you can see where time is lost or errors happen.

This word in other fields

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

More terms: Release and Maintenance

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