I/O bottlenecks

I/O bottlenecks, or I/O bottlenecks for short, are bottlenecks where your computer spends more time waiting on various inputs and outputs than it does on processing the information.

You'll typically find this type of bottleneck when you are working with an I/O heavy application. We could take your standard web browser as an example of a heavy I/O application. In a browser, we typically spend a significantly longer amount of time waiting for network requests to finish for things such as style sheets, scripts, or HTML pages to load as opposed to rendering this on the screen.

If the rate at which data is requested is slower than the rate at which it is consumed, then you have an I/O bottleneck.

One of the main ways to improve the speed of these applications is to either improve the speed of the underlying I/O by buying more expensive and faster hardware, or to improve the way in which we handle these I/O requests.

A great example of a program bound by I/O bottlenecks would be a...