Bottleneck literally refers to the top narrow part of a bottle. In engineering, it refers to a phenomenon where the performance or capacity of an entire system is limited by a single or small number of components or resources.
Bottleneck may also refer to:
Geography
- Choke point, a feature that reduces passability of terrain
- Free State Bottleneck, a quasi-state that existed in Germany during the time of the Weimar Republic
- Bottleneck (K2), a mountain feature near the top of K2 mountain
Computing
- 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
- Bottleneck (software), a software component that severely affects application performance
- Bottleneck (network), in communication networks using max-min fairness
Other
- Population bottleneck, an evolutionary event that drastically reduces a population
- Bottleneck guitar, also known as a slide guitar
- Traffic bottleneck, a local disruption in a transportation network
- Bottleneck (production), where one process reduces capacity of the whole chain of processes
- Headspace (firearms), a feature in firearm ammunition
See also
- Liebig's law of the minimum
- Reverse salient