In software engineering, a bottleneck occurs when the capacity of an application or a computer system is severely limited by a single component. The bottleneck has lowest throughput of all parts of the transaction path. As such, system designers will try to avoid bottlenecks and direct effort towards locating and tuning existing bottlenecks. Some examples of possible engineering bottlenecks are: a processor, a communication link, disk IO, etc. Any system or application will hit a bottleneck if the work arrives at a sufficiently fast pace.