Operation
A computer network typically consists of a number of servers, which host data and provide services to clients. The Internet is a good example, in which web servers are used to host websites, providing information to a potentially very large number of client computers.
Clients will make requests to servers, which will respond by sending the required data. As there will typically be many clients per server, the data processing demand on a server will generally be considerably greater than on any individual client. And so servers are typically implemented using computers with high data capacity and processing power.
The traffic on such a network will vary over time, and there will be periods when client requests will peak, sometimes exceeding the capacity of parts of network and causing congestion, especially in parts of the network that form bottlenecks. This can cause data request failures, or in worst cases, server crashes.
In order to prevent such occurrences, a server administrator may implement bandwidth throttling to control the number of requests a server responds to within a specified period of time.
When a server using bandwidth throttling reaches the specified limit, it will offload new requests and not respond to them. Sometimes they may be added to a queue to be processed once the bandwidth use reaches an acceptable level, but at peak times the request rate can even exceed the capacities of such queues and requests have to be thrown away.
Read more about this topic: Bandwidth Throttling
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