What Is A Bottleneck?

Date First Published: 22nd April 2022

Topic: Computer Networking

Subtopic: Data Transmission Technologies

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty: Medium

Difficulty Level: 4/10

CONTENTS

Causes Of Bottlenecks

Learn more about what a bottleneck is in this article.

In computing, a bottleneck occurs when one destination becomes overloaded with data, causing a network or server to slow down and limit its efficiency and productivity. Similar how a bottleneck in the everyday world means a place where the road becomes narrow or congested with traffic, causing the traffic to slow down, a bottleneck results in much slower data transfer rates due to the amount of traffic a network or server receives going beyond its maximum capacity.

An example of a bottleneck is a high-traffic website only having a limited amount of bandwidth. When lots of users visit the website at the same time, it may result in a bottleneck as the server will not be able to handle the amount of traffic that the website is receiving. Some users may experience slow loading times or errors when trying to visit the website. Bottlenecks can also occur due to excessive use of server resources, such as CPU or memory.

Causes Of Bottlenecks

The causes of bottlenecks are:

Too many users requesting resources at the same time. This most commonly causes bottlenecks. When there are more users requesting resources than the server or network can handle, it will cause the network or server to slow down.
Poor network design.
Hardware failures.
Excessive fan-in. This occurs when several storage devices are connected to the same switch to maximise the use of the bandwidth of that port. As a result, this can easily overload the port and cause the performance to drop if multiple storage devices are connected at the same time.

Note:

In most cases, bottlenecks gradually develop over time due to networks failing to keep track of the requirements of increased network and storage traffic and not automatically monitoring traffic loads.