"Bottleneck" Meaning, How to Avoid it, and Why You Should Care
| Reuben Howe
Dealing with tech necessitates jargon. It's simply far quicker and easier to refine everything to a few widely understood terms than to have to diagnose and explain every detail each time someone is talking about a tech issue.
For someone unfamiliar, though, terms like "bottleneck" and "bottlenecking" might not be all that intuitive.
Get to grips with these terms so you can explain issues you might be having, and understand solutions you might be given!
Where does the term "Bottlenecking" come from?
We can explain bottlenecking using the language of the word itself.
Imagine a bottle, filled with your favourite beverage. Imagine there's also a standard cup or standing glass, also filled that same beverage.
If I turn both the bottle and the glass over at the same time, I get very wet.
More importantly, all the liquid from the glass sploshes out right away, while the bottle slowly delivers a stream of the drink. The glass will be empty almost instantly, while the bottle takes a few moments to fully drain.
This is where we get the term "bottleneck", quite literally from the neck of a bottle.
In literal terms it's about the flow of drink from a bottle, but in practical terms we tend to use it to talk about anything but liquid!
What does "Bottleneck" mean in tech?
Obviously when you're talking to our customer service and we say a USB port if "Bottlenecking" a system, we don't mean that you should try turning it upside-down and seeing how fast liquid comes out of it.
Instead, it's analogous to the slow rate at which a bottle empties compared to a glass.
If a USB port is said to be "Bottlenecking" a system, it means that the USB port is restricting the flow of data, and providing only a small amount each second compared to the source.
The term can be applied to any situation where one component (A GPU, USB port, Hard Drive, Web Browser) is restricting the speed of a process that could be much faster.
Ironically, bottlenecking is good in actual bottles, but bad when used to talk about technology.
In general, you want your system running at maximum efficiency, so if one component is bottlenecking the system you reduce how well the entire operation performs.
Another example is Bluetooth.
We sell many Bluetooth adapters, but sometimes people will use a Bluetooth 5.3 super-fast modern adapter with their old Bluetooth 3.2 devices. The problem with this is that Bluetooth 5.3 supports far faster speeds than 3.2, but 3.2 can't suddenly match that speed.
This results in the maximum speed of a communication being based on the lowest possible speed of both devices. As this is Bluetooth 3.2 in our example, the 5.2 adapter isn't working to its full potential.
How to Avoid Bottlenecks
The best way to make sure your devices are running as intended is to use the cables provided, and use compatible devices of the same specification. This means matching Bluetooth versions, using direct USB connections without converters or adapters, and making sure the read/write speed of your storage is as fast as you are processing the data which needs storing.
The metrics will be different for every device, with some bottlenecking because of their speed while others because of their capacity. The key is to understand what you want to do, what roles your devices play in the system, and which part of that is the slowest / weakest.
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