Talk:Throughput

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This article is within the scope of WikiProject Telecommunications, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to telecommunications on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project as a "full time member" and/or contribute to the discussion.

The reference "It's the latency, stupid" asserts speed is distance divided by time, and bits are not distance, so bits/second is not speed. The speed of a runner may be distance divided by time, but the speed of a worker is not distance divided by time.

He points out the difference between the throughput and the speed of an oil tanker. It may be slow but still have a large capacity. I think that a more apt comparison would be to a pipeline, where the notion of 'serialization' can be applied.

I'm sure that latency is an important problem in the flow of bits and bytes through a computer and I would no doubt enjoy an entry devoted to the topic. The entry's title is Throughput, though, and in the Theory of Constraints the word is defined as: the money (not the output) an organization receives in exchange for the goods or services its customers (clients, students, patients, ...) receive. The signal (money) is received (or not) at the best time and place, and using throughput instead of output (goods and services produced but not necessarily sold) prevents the latency problem addressed in the entry. See, for example, Eliyahu M. Goldratt and the List of theory of constraints topics.

I would like to see a closer comparison between throughput and bandwidth. The differences, similarities and the common usages between the two.

Throughput is the actual speed data will transfer at from one point on the network to another. The actual speed, throughput, of a network is often quite less than it's Bandwidth, potential speed.

Bandwidth is more often quoted than Throughput since it is easier to calculate and not subject to changes in many variables. The hardware used to communicate, heavy/light traffic, etc…can effect throughput.

[edit] Too general a title?

throughput is used in a lot of different contexts to describe the rate at which a process works -- for example, throughput of an assembly line, throughput of a polling place, throughput of a communications channel (slightly more general than the discussion of internet connections here), and throughput of a CPU (quite relevant to the latency/throughput dichotomy raised in the article). There could/should be some discussion of queueing theory and the importance of throughput reserve to reduce queues; of traffic on roads (maximum throughput of a freeway occurs when the traffic is so heavy it drops to about 30 MPH); and of things like the throughput/power relation in engines. zowie 18:50, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

I agree with you that the title is too general. For instance, the Latency page is a disambig page and the Latency related to this article is Latency (engineering). The article titled "Throughput" should be a disambig page like Latency and this page should be renamed to "Throughput (communications)" or some other descriptor. -Etienne 08:43, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Shouldn't there also be under latency a reference to Round Trip Time (RTT)?