Encyclopedia > Bottleneck

  Article Content

Bottleneck

A bottleneck is literally the neck of a glass or pottery bottle. An hourglass[?] has a bottleneck at its mid-point whose diameter governs the time that granular contents of a given mass will take to pass through.

Metaphorically a bottleneck is a section of a route with a carrying capacity substantially below that characterising other sections of the same route.

This is often a narrow part of a road, perhaps also with a smaller number of lanes, or a reduction of the number of tracks of a railway line.

It may be due to a narrow bridge or tunnel, a deep cutting or narrow embankment, or work in progress on part of the road or railway.

More generally, a bottleneck is one process in a chain of processes, such that its limited capacity reduces the capacity of the whole chain.

See also Performance problem, Population bottleneck.



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
Dennis Gabor

... Wikipedia <<Up     Contents Dennis Gabor Dennis Gabor (Gábor Dénes) (1900-1979) was a Hungarian physicist. He invented holography in 1947, for ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 27.4 ms