Computer performance is characterized by the amount of useful work accomplished by a computer system or computer network compared to the time and resources used. Depending on the context, high computer performance may involve one or more of the following:

• Short response time for a given piece of work
• High throughput (rate of processing work)
• Low utilization of computing resource(s)
• High availability of the computing system or application
• Fast (or highly compact) data compression and decompression
• High bandwidth
• Short data transmission time