Throughput
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
Throughput is how much actual work gets done per second — how many requests your server handles, how much data it actually transfers. Bandwidth is the size of the pipe; throughput is the actual flow of water through it. A huge pipe with bad plumbing still has low throughput.
Real Talk
Throughput is the amount of data processed or transferred successfully per unit of time (requests/second, MB/s, transactions/second). Unlike bandwidth (theoretical maximum), throughput measures actual performance under real conditions, accounting for packet loss, retransmissions, protocol overhead, and application processing time.
When You'll Hear This
"The database throughput drops under high concurrency." / "We optimized the pipeline to go from 500 to 5,000 requests per second throughput."
Related Terms
Auto Scaling
Auto scaling is when the cloud automatically adds more servers when traffic spikes and removes them when it drops, so you're not paying for idle machines a...
Bandwidth
Bandwidth is how wide your internet pipe is — how much data can flow through per second. A narrow pipe means slow speeds, a wide pipe means fast speeds.
Latency
Latency is the delay before data starts moving — the time it takes for a request to go from your device to the server and back.
Load Balancer
A load balancer is like a traffic cop for servers.