Performance Bottlenecks

As opposed to the factors above, which deal with the actual amount of work the system must accomplish, a performance bottleneck represents a situation where (for whatever reason) some part of the system's resources are in use, but those resources are prevented from performing actual work. For example, this may occur if the AgilePoint system must interact with external systems, and is forced to wait for the external system to return requested data before the AgilePoint system will be able to continue performing more work. While this sort of scenario may not adversely affect performance at all (if properly planned for and implemented), it may tie up critical system resources (e.g. memory and CPU cycles) while waiting, that could instead be used to perform other work.

The best way to resolve bottleneck issues is to identify possible bottlenecks ahead of time, and to implement your processes in a way that will not tie up the system's resources unnecessarily when a potential bottleneck scenario occurs.