Bottleneck
Categories: Road transport | Musical performance techniques | Project management
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. A related concept is critical path.
In computer science, some authors refer to the von Neumann bottleneck between processor and memory.
Bottleneck is also a common term for slide guitar, because the broken-off neck of a bottle was and is often used to play that style of guitar. This musical form is most popular among Blues guitarists but is also found in some country and rock playing.
In a Surface Mount Technology (SMT) Board Assembly Line with several equipments aligned, usually the common sense is driven to set up and shift the bottleneck element towards the end of the process, inducing the better and faster machines to always keep the PCB supply flowing up, never allowing the slower one's full stop, a fact that would be heeded as a deleterious and significant overall drawback on the process.