A bottleneck, in a communications context, is a point in the enterprise where the flow ofdatais impaired or stopped entirely. Effectively, there isn't enough data handling capacity to handle the current volume of traffic.
A bottleneck can occur in the user network or storage fabric or withinservers where there is excessive contention for internal server resources, such asCPUprocessing power,memory, or I/O (input/output). As a result, data flow slows down to the speed of the slowest point in the data path. This slow down affects applicationperformance, especially fordatabases and other heavy transactional applications, and can even cause some applications to crash.
