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Look up bottleneck in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Bottleneck literally refers to the narrowed portion (neck) of a bottle near its opening, which limit the rate of outflow, and may describe any object of a similar shape. The literal neck of a bottle was originally used to play what is now known as slide guitar.
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Metaphorically, the term may also be used as an analogy for any of the following implications of rate limitation or function restriction:
Computing
edit- Bottleneck (network), in communication networks using max-min fairness
- Bottleneck (software), a software component that severely affects application performance
- Internet bottleneck, when high usage slows the performance on the Internet at a particular point
- Von Neumann bottleneck, a limit of throughput between a computer's processor and memory
- Interconnect bottleneck
Geography
edit- Bottleneck (K2), a mountain feature near the top of K2 mountain
- Choke point, a feature that reduces passability of terrain
- Free State of Bottleneck, a quasi-state that existed in Germany during the time of the Weimar Republic
Other
edit- Bottleneck (engineering), where the performance of an entire system is limited by a single component
- Bottleneck (production), where one process reduces capacity of the whole chain of processes
- Nocturnal bottleneck hypothesis to explain several mammal traits
- Population bottleneck, an evolutionary event that drastically reduces a population
- Traffic bottleneck, a local disruption in a transportation network
- Bottleneck, a design element of some firearms cartridge cases