Perhaps you’ve decided to learn a little more about the inner workings of your computer, or you’re in the market for new components and want to better understand the specs that determine your PC’s performance. Cracking open the contents of a computer is like looking under the hood of a car for the first time — to the uninitiated, it looks like an indecipherable jungle of byzantine metal puzzle pieces.
Below we will explain one of the most common and easy to understand terms you will probably encounter during your first attempt at making sausages in the computer world: throughput. We will explain exactly what Throughput is, how it works and why it is useful to know!
Throughput, in simple terms, refers to the amount of data that has been passed between a set of points — whether it’s between hard drives or across an Internet connection or somewhere else. The term actually comes from non-computer contexts as a measure of how much of something can be processed — whether it’s freight on a shipping line, passengers on a subway system, products from an assembly plant, etc.
In the context of computing, throughput specifically refers to the speed of data transfer between two locations.
