When you buy through affiliate links in our content, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Learn What Does Network Bottleneck Mean?
A network bottleneck refers to a discrete condition in which data flow is limited by computer or network resources. The flow of data is controlled according to the bandwidth of various system resources. If the system working on a network is delivering a higher volume of data than what is supported by the existing capacity of the network, then a network bottleneck will occur.
A common computing bottleneck culprit is network data interruption caused by microprocessor circuitry or TCP/IP.
A network bottleneck is also known as a bottleneck or hot spot.
Techopedia Explains Network Bottleneck
As the name implies, a network bottleneck results in slow communication speeds and limits user efficiency and productivity on a network. To avoid all these problems, systems are built to support a particular data flow capacity so that work can continue without any issues. On a network, each system is able to work according its processor speed, its memory size, its cache speed and its network interface card speed. These discrete systems do not rely on other network resources to accept their incoming data at the rate they are sending because these objects only receive data according to their own capacity.
A bottleneck occurs when bandwidth is unable to accommodate large amounts of system data at designated data transfer rate speeds. Road traffic is a common bottleneck analogy. For example, bottlenecking is inevitable when only one of two busy road lanes is passable.
Bottlenecks are caused by multiple factors, including:
- Hardware components, like CPUs
- Graphical processing units
- RAM memory
