Bottlenecks affect microprocessor performance by slowing down the flow of information back and forth from the CPU and the memory. If all of the components of a system are not able to feed the same amount of data at the same speed, a delay is created. For example, a 2GB processor will be severely bottlenecked by an 800MB memory bandwidth.
Bottlenecks affect network performance by slowing down the flow of information transmitted across networks. TCP/IP connections were originally designed to transmit only text files, and the proliferation of bandwidth-intensive transmissions such as high-resolution graphics has caused bottlenecks in the process; therefore, the data moves more slowly across networks.
(v.) To delay the tranmission of data through a data path.
