Meaning
The volume of data, requests, or transactions a system can process successfully in a given amount of time.
Three examples from work
Load testing
QA LeadOur payment service handled maximum throughput of 5,000 transactions per second.
ArchitectThat gives us plenty of headroom for Black Friday sales.
Database optimization
DBASwitching to connection pooling doubled our database read throughput.
LeadNow the API servers are no longer bottlenecked waiting for database connections.
Architecture review
LeadWhat is the primary goal: minimizing latency or maximizing throughput?
ArchitectFor batch processing, maximize throughput; for user-facing APIs, minimize latency.
Commonly measured in Requests Per Second (RPS) or Transactions Per Second (TPS). Contrast throughput (volume) with latency (speed of a single unit).