läbivust

Läbivust is the Estonian term for throughput, a metric used in information technology and telecommunications to describe the rate at which useful data is successfully transferred from a source to a destination over a channel or system. It is a practical measure of performance that can apply to networks, storage systems, and processing pipelines, and it is often discussed in relation to, but distinct from, capacity or bandwidth.

Throughput represents the actual data rate achieved under given conditions. It is influenced by factors such as protocol overhead, latency, packet loss, retransmissions, queuing, and hardware performance. Throughput is typically expressed in bits per second (bps), kilobits per second (kbps), megabits per second (Mbps), or bytes per second (B/s) for non-network contexts. It is important to distinguish throughput from bandwidth: bandwidth denotes the maximum possible data rate of a link, while throughput is what is realized in practice.

Related concepts include goodput, which specifically measures the rate of useful payload data delivered, excluding protocol overhead and retransmissions. Throughput can be measured end-to-end or at a particular segment of a system, and it is commonly assessed with benchmarking tools or traffic analyses.

Factors affecting throughput include network congestion, latency, errors, encryption overhead, QoS policies, and system bottlenecks. Improvements come from increasing capacity where possible, reducing overhead, optimizing protocols, prioritizing traffic, caching, compression, or upgrading hardware and network paths.

See also: bandwidth, goodput, latency, quality of service.