Gadgetory

a bottleneck occurs when there is some restrictive element holding back the performance that could otherwise be achieved the name comes from the way that fluid flows much slower through the neck of a bottle than it would if that neck didn't exist another word for a bottleneck is a choke point let's start with a couple of examples in a vehicle the traction between the tires and the road is important for optimal power delivery between the engine and the road making the car move forward now an example of where traction would be a bottleneck would be if your engine is so powerful that when you go to accelerate the wheels just spin now at high speeds a wing can improve traction by using air flow to force the rear of the car down towards the road this can alleviate that bottleneck well hey that sounds great why don't we just all get wings and put them on our cars no that's not the answer this civics performance for example was not limited by rear wheel traction and it probably doesn't even have sufficient power for the benefit of the downward force to outweigh the negative effects of the additional wind resistance caused by this upgrade so in this case it wasn't a bottleneck at all so changing it doesn't help and actually might even make things worse so this is a tech channel so our next example is a PC one let's say you take a very old computer and assuming it's even compatible you put the very latest thousand dollar graphics card in it the PC is not going to slow down and honestly gaming performance will probably be improved but that card won't reach its potential even though the new card might be ten times faster than the old one you may only get a small performance increase because the CPU and memory and potentially other components are so slow that they can't feed the graphics card data at a fast enough rate to keep it busy so it's just sitting there most of the time in that example of bottlenecking those funds could have been put to better use on a more modest all-around system upgrade which would have achieved better performance in gaming and in other applications at the same time now with a little that out of the way it's important to clarify this whether we're talking about your PC car air conditioner phone or even your very own body everything has bottlenecks you can't just hide from them until the point where a task can be performed perfectly and instantly something is always holding back or bottlenecking the process so if they exist everywhere what can we do about them the answer is to reduce them avoid extreme bottlenecks figure out what you're trying to achieve and direct your resources towards the things that directly affect the performance of the things that you care about so back to pcs as an example if you're a gamer spending a big chunk of your budget on a graphics card does make sense as long as the rest of your components are reasonably up to snuff if you're not sure how to balance your configuration check out the Linus tech tips comm form for fast friendly support speaking of support audible.com is a proud supporter of tech quickie head on over to audible.com slash tech quickie to get a free audio book just for trying their subscription service that delivers a new audio book of your choice to you every month audiobooks are great to listen to while you're driving cooking or doing anything else that would prevent you from reading a physical book and there are actually some pretty unique experiences available for example Ender's Game alive is a full cast audio play with an original script by Ender's Game author Orson spot so it's not just limited to having a novel narrated to you head on over to audible.com slash tech wiki linked in the video description and as always guys thanks again for watching this as fast as possible episode like the video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment if you loved bottlenecks or if you hate bottlenecks or have anything else to say about bottlenecks and as always guys don't forget to subscribe for more videos like this from tech quickie