We consider a sequence of cycles of exponential single-server nodes, where the number of nodes is fixed and the number of customers grows unboundedly. We prove a central limit theorem for the cycle time distribution. We investigate the idle time structure of the bottleneck nodes and the joint sojourn time distribution that a test customer observes at the nonbottleneck nodes during a cycle. Furthermore, we study the filling behaviour of the bottleneck nodes, and show that the single bottleneck and multiple bottleneck cases lead to different asymptotic behaviours.