Bottleneckurinn

Bottleneckurinn is the Icelandic term for a bottleneck—a point in a process that limits overall capacity and determines the maximum throughput of the system. The term emphasizes how one slow step can drag down the entire operation, even if other parts run smoothly.

In production and operations management, bottlenecks constrain flow and set cycle times. Improving the bottleneck typically yields greater gains in performance than optimizing non-bottleneck steps. The concept is central to the Theory of Constraints (TOC), which focuses on identifying and elevating the primary bottleneck to raise the throughput of the whole chain.

In information technology and computing, bottlenecks arise where hardware or software components restrict performance. Common examples include slow disk input/output, limited network bandwidth, or a single-threaded processor becoming saturated. Identifying the bottleneck often involves analyzing throughput, utilization, and latency, and correlating these with the workload.

Mitigation strategies include increasing capacity at the bottleneck, redistributing tasks, parallelizing work, optimizing code or queries, and employing caching or load balancing to smooth demand. In many cases, small improvements at the bottleneck produce larger overall gains than sweeping changes elsewhere.

The concept is widely taught in engineering, manufacturing, and IT contexts, and it is used in everyday Icelandic discourse to describe situations where a single component limits the performance of a larger system.