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Software Engineering vocabulary · Release and Maintenance

Throughput

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

/ˈθruːpʊt/nounCommon term

In software engineering, throughput means: The amount of work a system completes in a given time, for example requests per second, messages per minute or megabytes per second.

In Turkish: işlem hacmi, aktarım hızı, verim

How it is used

Usually discussed together with latency: latency is how long one request takes, throughput is how many requests finish per second. Requests per second is often written RPS. Throughput increases, drops or hits a ceiling.

Example sentences

  1. After the fix, throughput went up from 2,000 to 5,000 requests per second.

  2. The disk throughput is the limit here, not the CPU.

Common collocations

  • high throughput
  • increase throughput
  • requests per second
  • network throughput
  • latencyThe time a request or piece of data takes to travel through a system and get a response, usually measured in milliseconds.
  • 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.
  • scalableAble to handle more users, data or traffic by adding resources, without a complete redesign and without becoming much slower.
  • metricA number measured regularly over time to show how a system is behaving, such as CPU use, memory, request count or error rate.

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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