From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishbottleneckbot‧tle‧neck /ˈbɒtlnek $ ˈbɑː-/ noun [countable] 1 TTRa place in a road where the traffic cannot pass easily, so that there are a lot of delays2 DELAYa delay in one stage of a process that makes the whole process take longer Understaffing has caused a real bottleneck.
Examples from the Corpus
bottleneck• There's always going to be a bottleneck because only two people review all the applications.• Computer buffs call this a bottleneck.• This generated bottlenecks which in turn led to a fall in industrial production.• If we don't hire more people in production we're going to have a huge bottleneck in a few months.• These, or a hundred other weaknesses or incompatibilities in computer systems, create information bottlenecks at crucial times.• Internet bottlenecks and overloaded servers at popular Web sites can still create substantial delays.• He pointed out that the client/server bottleneck is caused by the development time.• They discovered that bottleneck after bottleneck arose from extreme specialization within the department.• One of the bottlenecks for PGPis key management.• Automatic packing machines should get rid of the bottlenecks in the process.From Longman Business Dictionarybottleneckbot‧tle‧neck /ˈbɒtlnekˈbɑː-/ noun [countable] a delay in one stage of a process that makes the whole process slower and more difficultHe said the company would not be vulnerable to production bottlenecks because it has 10 subcontractors in the Far East where it does all its manufacturing. 