3.1. Identifying Areas of System Bottlenecks
The tapered neck of a bottle, with its substantially smaller diameter than the body of the bottle, restricts the flow of liquid from the bottle. Bottlenecks occur on your computer as well. They happen when most system resources are fine, except for that one subsystem that is heavily overused. To perform any task, a limited number of resources can be applied to a task; when the task exceeds the available resources, you run into problems. Computers have four critical resources that can be the source of a bottleneck:
Processor
Memory
Disk
Network
NOTE
All system bottlenecks will occur in one of these four resources, which are the main subsystems in a computer.
In addition to resource overuse, hardware errors might also cause problems. This chapter does not examine possible hardware errors that can cause problems or issues that might be specific to a particular type of application or service. Most hardware issues are dealt with in Book IV, Chapter 2, which is devoted to troubleshooting.
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