r to see whether you have any outstanding tickets. Transaction processing is characterized by many short inputs and short outputs, which means it is generally a fairly low-bandwidth application, assuming that it involves text-based messages. Remember that if you add images or video, the bandwidth requirements grow sub- stantially. Thus, if a police officer downloads a photo from your license, the band- width required rises. Transaction processing is very delay sensitive because with transactions, you generally have a person waiting for something to be completed (e.g., for a reservation to be made, for a sales transaction to be approved, for a seat to be assigned by an airline). Users want subsecond response time, SO with transac- tion processing, minimizing delays is very important, and increased traffic contrib- utes to delay. For example, say you're at an airport and your flight is canceled. Everyone queues up to get on another flight. The agents work as quickly as they can, but because of the increased level of traffic as more people try to get on the one available flight, everything backs up, and you have to wait a long time for a response. With transaction processing, you have to be aware of delay, and error control is the responsibility of the endpoints. Transaction processing is fairly toler- ant of losses because the applications ensure that all the elements and records asso- ciated with a particular transaction have been properly sent and received before committing the transaction to the underlying database. Another type of application is file transfer, which involves moving a large amount of data from one computer to another. File transfer is generally a high- bandwidth application because it deals with a bulk of data, particularly if you are in a hurry to receive the entire file. File transfer is machine-to-machine communi- cation, and the machines can work around delay factors, as long as they're not try- ing to perform a real-time function based on the information being delivered. File transfer is a 