Throughput
Throughput turns up in 2 fields: vacuum, shop slang. Here is what it means to the people in each one.
Throughput in vacuum
How much gas flows past a point each second, counted as pressure times volume, in units such as mbar·L/s.
Gas flow expressed as pressure times volumetric flow, Q = p·S, in mbar·L/s, Torr·L/s or Pa·m³/s. Because it counts gas quantity rather than volume, throughput is conserved along a pumping line in steady state: the gas leaving the chamber is the gas arriving at the backing pump. Engineers use it to size backing pumps, to check whether a turbo can swallow a process flow, and to put leaks and outgassing in the same units.
"Process flow is 200 sccm, that's about 3.4 mbar-litres a second of throughput the turbo has to swallow."
Throughput in shop slang
The total volume of work or product passing through a system in a given time.
The rate at which a machine, assembly line, or entire facility produces its final output. It measures actual completed units rather than theoretical capacity. Managers track it closely to identify bottlenecks and calculate the overall efficiency of the operation.
"If we speed up the packaging conveyor, we can increase our daily throughput by at least ten percent."