JargonFile/original/html/H/hot-spot.html
2014-03-27 18:54:56 +00:00

23 lines
3.4 KiB
HTML
Raw Blame History

This file contains invisible Unicode characters

This file contains invisible Unicode characters that are indistinguishable to humans but may be processed differently by a computer. If you think that this is intentional, you can safely ignore this warning. Use the Escape button to reveal them.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" standalone="no"?>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title>hot spot</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="../../jargon.css" type="text/css"/><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.61.0"/><link rel="home" href="../index.html" title="The Jargon File"/><link rel="up" href="../H.html" title="H"/><link rel="previous" href="hot-chat.html" title="hot chat"/><link rel="next" href="hotlink.html" title="hotlink"/></head><body><div class="navheader"><table width="100%" summary="Navigation header"><tr><th colspan="3" align="center">hot spot</th></tr><tr><td width="20%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="hot-chat.html">Prev</a> </td><th width="60%" align="center">H</th><td width="20%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="hotlink.html">Next</a></td></tr></table><hr/></div><dt><a id="hot-spot"/><dt xmlns="" id="hot-spot"><b>hot spot</b>: <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="grammar">n.</span></dt></dt><dd><p> 1. [primarily used by C/Unix programmers, but spreading] It is
received wisdom that in most programs, less than 10% of the code eats 90%
of the execution time; if one were to graph instruction visits versus code
addresses, one would typically see a few huge spikes amidst a lot of
low-level noise. Such spikes are called <span class="firstterm">hot
spots</span> and are good candidates for heavy optimization or
<a href="hand-hacking.html"><i class="glossterm">hand-hacking</i></a>. The term is especially used of tight
loops and recursions in the code's central algorithm, as opposed to (say)
initial set-up costs or large but infrequent I/O operations. See
<a href="../T/tune.html"><i class="glossterm">tune</i></a>, <a href="hand-hacking.html"><i class="glossterm">hand-hacking</i></a>. </p></dd><dd><p> 2. The active location of a cursor on a bit-map display. &#8220;<span class="quote">Put
the mouse's hot spot on the &#8216;ON&#8217; widget and click the left
button.</span>&#8221; </p></dd><dd><p> 3. A screen region that is sensitive to mouse gestures, which
trigger some action. World Wide Web pages now provide the
<a href="../C/canonical.html"><i class="glossterm">canonical</i></a> examples; WWW browsers present hypertext
links as hot spots which, when clicked on, point the browser at another
document (these are specifically called
<a href="hotlink.html"><i class="glossterm">hotlink</i></a>s).</p></dd><dd><p> 4. In a massively parallel computer with shared memory, the one
location that all 10,000 processors are trying to read or write at once
(perhaps because they are all doing a <a href="../B/busy-wait.html"><i class="glossterm">busy-wait</i></a> on
the same lock). </p></dd><dd><p> 5. More generally, any place in a hardware design that turns into a
performance bottleneck due to resource contention.</p></dd><div class="navfooter"><hr/><table width="100%" summary="Navigation footer"><tr><td width="40%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="hot-chat.html">Prev</a> </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="u" href="../H.html">Up</a></td><td width="40%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="hotlink.html">Next</a></td></tr><tr><td width="40%" align="left" valign="top">hot chat </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="h" href="../index.html">Home</a></td><td width="40%" align="right" valign="top"> hotlink</td></tr></table></div></body></html>