The Minimum Maximum: what is a bottleneck?

When you have a system that is made of various parts, there will always be some part which limits the overall performance of the system. Within flow situations (water, gas, data, etc.) this is called a "bottleneck". However, this concept can be extended to many things that we encounter in life, so I am going to discuss a more general concept that I call the "Minimum Maximum".

For example, you see a really high-performance car on the road. However, the performance of this car is much worse than you know of its capability -- it takes several seconds to start after the light says to go, it cuts corners or moves across the dividing lines of the road, it's speed varies on a constant basis. The reality is that the performance of the car is based on the best ability of the car and the driver. If the car is great and the driver's ability is "poor to middlin" then the car will only be capable of being driven. The purchase of a car is based on capability to buy -- not capability to drive. So, the high-performance car is "wasted" with the not-so-good driver. The car can be called "overkill" because its features and performance cannot be used appropriately.

If a race-car driver is behind the wheel of a poor-performance car then she or he will only be able to drive that car to the best of its ability. It is optimum to "tune" the system. Good cars for good drivers and poor cars for poor drivers.

In the world of the Internet, this is more often called a bottleneck. Let's say that you have a broadband connection that can provide 30 Mega bits per second (Mbps). However, you have an older computer and it can only process data at a rate up to 10 Mbps. The ability to use data from the Internet will be limited to the 10 Mbps of the computer. Going the other direction, if you have a powerful comupter but your access to the Internet is limited to 128 kilobits per second (128 kpbs) then you might as well get a slower (and less expensive) connection.

This would also apply to general gaming (not multiplayer and not connected to the Internet. If your disk drive can access data at 5 Mbps and your processor can only display at a rate of  3 Mbps then your disk drive is faster than necessary.

The problem with many situations for optimizing (or tuning) is that it is done in a multipurpose way. In the first Internet case, replacing the computer (or upgrading it) would increase the overall performance    The same holds true for the second example (upgrading the computer will raise overall performance.

I'm sure that you can think of many other instances. When my family goes off to Chuch, we often have to wait for the "slowest". -- that person is the Minimum Maximum.

Whenever two or more systems interact, the various parts will work at various speeds/capabilities. Similar to doing Least Common Denominator (LCD) problems in school, the "MinMax" is the way to dtermine what is slowing down YOUR system (and an indicator as to what might need to be upgraded first.
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