Congestion

How it is used

Used in performance discussions, capacity planning and operator reports. Congestion builds up at peak hours, causes latency and packet loss, and is managed with QoS and capacity upgrades. Operators talk about evening congestion, when everyone is streaming video.

Example sentences

1. Congestion on the uplink between 8 and 11 p.m. is causing the packet loss.

2. We added a second 10G link to relieve congestion between the data centres.

Common collocations

• network congestion
• peak-hour congestion
• relieve congestion
• congestion control
• link congestion

Related terms

• bandwidthThe maximum amount of data a connection can carry in a given time, usually measured in megabits or gigabits per second (Mbps, Gbps).
• bottleneckThe one slowest or most limited part of a system, such as the database or the network, that holds back the performance of everything else.
• QoSShort for quality of service: a set of techniques that give important traffic, such as voice and video, priority over less urgent traffic when a link is busy.
• packet lossA situation in which some packets sent across a network never reach their destination, usually shown as a percentage; it causes slow downloads, choppy calls and frozen video.
• latencyThe time a request or piece of data takes to travel through a system and get a response, usually measured in milliseconds.

This word in other fields

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

• congestion · Networking & Telecommunications

More terms: APIs, Networking and Security

• API
• endpoint
• REST
• JSON
• status code
• payload
• authentication
• third-party
• SDK
• breaking change
• request
• response