Bottleneck (software)

Article summary

In software engineering, a bottleneck occurs when the capacity of an application or a computer system is limited by a single component, like the neck of a bottle slowing down the overall water flow. The bottleneck has the lowest throughput of all parts of the transaction path. System designers try to avoid bottlenecks through direct effort towards locating and tuning existing bottlenecks in a software application. Some examples of engineering bottlenecks that appear include the following: a processor, a communication link, and disk IO. A system or application will hit a bottleneck if the work arrives at a comparatively faster pace relative to other processing components. According to the theory of constraints, improving on the occurrences of hot-spot point of the bottleneck constraint improves the overall processing speed of the software. A thought-provoking stipulation of the theory reveals that improving the efficiency of a particular process stage rather than the constraint can generate even more delay and decrease overall processing capabilities of a software. It is impossible to remove bottlenecks completely since there is always a component that limits the overall performance, so the usual goal is to improve the bottleneck component so that the whole system can achieve the desired performance.…

Key claims

No claims recorded.

Discussion questions

1. Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
2. Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
3. If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?

Bibliography

No sources recorded.