What are performance bottlenecks?

A performance bottleneck is like a slow part in a fast-moving game that makes everything else slower too.

Imagine you and your friends are playing a relay race. You all run super fast, but one person is really slow at passing the baton. Because of that one slow spot, the whole team ends up being slower than they could be. That slow person is like a performance bottleneck, it’s not the whole team that’s slow, just one part.

Sometimes, even though everything else is working well, one thing can’t keep up with the rest. Like when you're drinking from a straw, and the water comes out fast, but your mouth can only drink so much at once. The bottleneck is your mouth, it’s slowing down the whole process.

Bottlenecks can be in computers too, like when a game runs slowly because the graphics are taking too long to load, even though everything else is working fine.