What Is Indicated By The Term Throughput?

What Is Indicated By The Term Throughput?

Throughput can be defined as the number of bits that are transferred over the medium in a given period of time. Today, let us discuss the concept of throughput in detail. The throughput is like the actual amount of the data that is passing through the medium or through a connection.

Let us consider an example to understand the throughput in detail. Let say that the network connection is like a bridge and the bits that are passing through it consider as a vehicle. Here, when we want to measure the number of vehicles that can be passed through the bridge, then it can be called bandwidth.

For suppose the vehicles need to stop to pay for the toll, then the number of occurrences of the vehicles may decrease per hour, now we are talking about the throughput. But why do we need the term throughput?. What is the use of the throughput?.

Now, let us learn this in detail. we all know that speed is the most important term that we need to measure to find any performance. And the way to measure this speed is through throughput and bandwidth. Let us take another example to understand this concept in detail. Let say there is a tank that has a capacity of 100 liters. Here the maximum capacity of the tank is considered as the bandwidth. But the tank has carried only 70 liters of water in it. Now, the actual liters that the tank is carrying is called the throughput.

The throughput only says the amount of data that is transmitted from the source address to the destination address, but not the actual capacity of the medium can hold. The throughput can be measured as bits/sec or it can be measured as bytes per second. The measurement of the throughput can be done at any layer of the OSI model.

The data transmitted per unit of time is called throughput. The standard unit of the data that is transmitted can be called a bit. And the standard elapsed time is called second. The maximum data that can be transmitted through a layer is called the maximum throughput. The other name of the maximum throughput is called the digital bandwidth. The throughput might not be at the physical layer but it may be at the other layers of the OSI model.

The bandwidth capacity at the physical layer of the OSI model will not be a limit to the maximum throughput. The term throughput is also very common in the performance testing field. The term throughput can be used in various contexts. The term throughput can be used at the network, server, and at the request.

There is another term that we need to compare with the throughput to avoid confusion. That is called latency. When we search anything on the web browser and the time taken to get a response from the server is called latency which is a slight difference from the term throughput.