throughput

Advanced 💻 Tech / IT

Definition

The amount of data, transactions, or work that flows through a system in a given time period—basically measuring how much stuff your system can churn through before collapsing. It's the metric that separates the systems that can handle Black Friday traffic from those that crumble under three simultaneous users. Higher throughput is always better, until you realize it's bottlenecked by that one database query you wrote in 2019.

Example Usage

Our throughput is impressive in testing, but in production it drops to almost nothing because someone forgot to index the database.

Source: Systems performance terminology

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data

The plural of datum that everyone treats as singular, representing collected facts, measurements, or observations that fuel our entire digital economy. Data is simultaneously the most valuable resource of the 21st century and the thing everyone agrees to share without reading terms of service. It's what companies collect obsessively, analysts interpret creatively, and privacy advocates worry about constantly.

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var

In tech-speak, a unit of reactive electrical power, but more commonly recognized as the keyword that lets programmers declare variables without overthinking what type they should be. VAR also moonlights as "Video Assistant Referee" in sports, proving that three letters can mean entirely different things depending on whether you're debugging code or disputing an offside call. The chameleon of acronyms.

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Kubernetes

A container orchestration platform so complex that understanding it fully is considered a personality trait. Named after the Greek word for helmsman, which is fitting because you'll need divine navigation skills to configure it correctly.

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rez

Gaming slang meaning to create, spawn, or materialize an object in a virtual environment, particularly in MMORPGs and virtual worlds like Second Life. Short for 'resurrect' or 'realize,' it's what you say when you're trying to manifest your digital stuff but the server gods are not cooperating. The virtual equivalent of pulling something out of thin air, except when lag says 'nah.'

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Rollback

Reverting to a previous version of the software because the new version set something on fire, either literally or figuratively. A rollback is the "undo" button of production, and pressing it is always accompanied by a mixture of relief and shame.

💻 Tech / IT

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ak

1. Misspelled form of the term "ahk." see also: ahk...