For anyone wondering what this is, this is nothing more than me, a intermediate programmer, posting my answer to what all these terms are.
Everyday I'll post my interpretation of these network engineering terms, and if anyone has any corrections for it, please post it in the comments below.
1. latency
this is how long it takes for a packet to travel from the source to its destination
The lower this is, the less time it takes for a packet to be sent through a network
An example: a HTTPS packet from a client takes a short amount of time to travel to the server, meaning that the latency is low
2. bandwidth
this is the amount of data that can be transported over a certain network in a given amount of time, like bytes per minute for example.
this is usually measured in bits per second, so dont expect anything like bytes per minute, as that was just an example in the above sentence.
3. throughput
this is the amount of data thats successfully transported over a network without any data loss
good throughput usually means that data, like a packet, has been moved successfully without any data loss to its reciever, like a browser successfully sending data over to a server like https://dev.to
4. Protocol
this is what decides how data is transported, and also other things like whats transported and other aspects of data transport.
Like the laws of how communication in a network should work
Example:
a TCP connection established between two computers, or a simple UDP connection just sending data without any form of connection establishment
5. Port
This is a program that takes the data from a message from a sender, and then will deal with that recieved data from there
Example:
say you were, in your browser, to type in the link https://dev.to:443
from there the program running on the computer that the IP address "dev.to" points to, is the program that the port points to, and that program recieves the data and deals with it from there.
Example:
if you were to type into the browser https://dev.to:80, that would mean that at the 80th port, which is a program, would recieve the data from the sender, which is the browser, and then handle the data from there.
Top comments (2)
Small correction to section 5: a port is a numeric transport identifier, not the program itself. An application can listen on a port; the operating system uses the addressing and transport information to deliver traffic to the appropriate socket. RFC 6335 explains this distinction: rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6335.html#se...
Also, dev.to:80 still requests HTTPS/TLS, just on port 80. It would need a compatible HTTPS service there; changing the port does not change the URL scheme. HTTP and HTTPS default to ports 80 and 443 respectively: rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9110.html#se...
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