throughput

Advanced 💻 Tech / IT

Definition

The amount of data, transactions, or work that flows through a system in a given time period—basically measuring how much stuff your system can churn through before collapsing. It's the metric that separates the systems that can handle Black Friday traffic from those that crumble under three simultaneous users. Higher throughput is always better, until you realize it's bottlenecked by that one database query you wrote in 2019.

Example Usage

Our throughput is impressive in testing, but in production it drops to almost nothing because someone forgot to index the database.

Source: Systems performance terminology

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