Good morning! Today is Wednesday — Architecture & System Design day. These are words every developer needs when discussing scalability, reliability, and infrastructure decisions. You’ll hear them in design reviews, on-call handoffs, and every technical interview.

🌟 Word of the Day: Throughput

IPA Pronunciation: /ˈθruːˌpaʊt/

Vietnamese meaning: Thông lượng / Lưu lượng xử lý

Throughput is the amount of work a system can process in a given time period. In software, it’s often measured as requests per second, transactions per minute, or messages processed per hour.

When engineers say “we need to improve throughput,” they mean the system should handle more work in the same amount of time — not just respond faster to one request.

🗣️ 3 Example Sentences

  1. “Our payment service throughput dropped to 200 TPS during the flash sale — we need to scale up before Black Friday.”
  2. “Adding more read replicas improved our database throughput by 3x without touching the application code.”
  3. “Throughput and latency are often in tension — optimizing for one can hurt the other.”

🔗 Practice Links

📋 Vocabulary Table

PhraseVietnameseExample
throughputthông lượng xử lý”We hit 50,000 requests/second throughput at peak load.”
bottlenecknút cổ chai / điểm nghẽn”The database was the bottleneck — everything else was waiting for it.”
horizontal scalingmở rộng theo chiều ngang”We solved the traffic spike by horizontal scaling — spinning up 10 more instances.”
fault tolerancekhả năng chịu lỗi”The system’s fault tolerance means one node can fail without affecting users.”
load balancingcân bằng tải”The load balancer distributes traffic evenly across all healthy instances.”

🎯 Pronunciation Guide

Word of the Day Breakdown: throughput

SyllableSoundVietnamese hint
through/θruː/“thruu” — lưỡi giữa răng trên để tạo âm /θ/
put/ˌpaʊt/“paut” — giống “pout” (môi trề)

Stress: THROUGH-put → stress on the first syllable.

The hardest part: The /θ/ sound (th). Vietnamese doesn’t have this sound. Practice:

  • Put your tongue lightly between your teeth
  • Blow air out while saying “t”
  • Result: /θ/ — different from Vietnamese “t”

Common mistakes: Vietnamese speakers often say “throo-put” (skipping the /θ/) or “froo-put.” The tongue-between-teeth position is essential.

🔊 Practice Sentence (read aloud 3x)

“Our system’s throughput bottleneck was the database — horizontal scaling didn’t help until we added load balancing.”

Break it down slowly:

  • Our SYS-tem’s THROUGH-put BOT-tle-neck
  • was the DA-ta-base
  • hor-i-ZON-tal SCAL-ing did-n’t HELP
  • un-til we ADD-ed LOAD BAL-anc-ing

✏️ Exercise 1: Fill in the Blank

Complete these sentences with the correct term from the vocabulary table:

  1. After adding more servers behind the ______, response time improved for all users. (load balancer / database / bottleneck)
  2. The system showed poor ______ during peak hours — only 500 requests per second instead of 5,000. (throughput / latency / uptime)
  3. We need ______ for the API tier — one server can’t handle 10 million daily users. (horizontal scaling / fault tolerance / caching)
  4. Redis went down but users didn’t notice because of our ______: the app fell back to the database automatically. (fault tolerance / load balancing / throughput)
✅ Answers
  1. load balancer
  2. throughput
  3. horizontal scaling
  4. fault tolerance

✏️ Exercise 2: Translate to English

Translate these Vietnamese sentences into natural English:

  1. Chúng tôi cần cải thiện thông lượng của hệ thống trước khi ra mắt tính năng mới.
  2. Nút cổ chai lớn nhất là database — mọi request đều phải chờ nó.
  3. Cân bằng tải giúp phân phối traffic đều giữa các server.
✅ Sample Answers
  1. “We need to improve the system’s throughput before launching the new feature.”
  2. “The biggest bottleneck is the database — every request has to wait for it.”
  3. “Load balancing helps distribute traffic evenly across servers.”

💡 Idiom of the Day: “The weakest link”

Meaning: The part of a system (or team) that is most likely to fail and limits overall performance. From the literal idea of a chain breaking at its weakest link.

Vietnamese: Mắt xích yếu nhất — điểm dễ bị phá vỡ nhất trong hệ thống

2 Examples:

  1. “Our database is the weakest link in the architecture — everything else can scale, but the DB becomes a bottleneck above 10,000 TPS.”
  2. “In a microservices system, the weakest link is usually the synchronous dependency chain — if one service is slow, everything upstream slows too.”

In a design review:

“What’s the weakest link in this design?” “Probably the external payment gateway — we have no fallback if it goes down.”

📺 Recommended Watching

For Architecture & System Design English

  1. ByteByteGo — System Design Series (YouTube) Alex Xu explains architecture concepts in very clear, structured English. Perfect for learning how to describe system design decisions. → Search: “ByteByteGo system design interview”

  2. Gaurav Sen — Distributed Systems (YouTube) Deep dives into real distributed systems problems. Natural, conversational tech English. → Search: “Gaurav Sen distributed systems”

  3. Fireship — 100 Seconds of Code (YouTube) Short, dense explanations of architecture concepts in punchy English. Great for building technical vocabulary fast. → https://www.youtube.com/@Fireship

🎯 Today’s Challenge

One tiny action to do right now (5 minutes):

In your next code review or design discussion today, use at least one of these words naturally:

  • “What’s the bottleneck here?”
  • “How does this scale horizontally?”
  • “What’s the throughput at peak load?”

If you’re not in a meeting today, write a one-sentence architecture note for a system you know well:

“[System name]‘s bottleneck is ______ — we could improve throughput by ______.”

This forces you to think in English about architecture you actually work with — the most effective vocabulary practice there is.

See you at the noon session! ☀️ Today’s noon topic: Architecture Communication Phrases — how to explain system design decisions in meetings.

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