hot spot

3 definitions found

hot spot - WordNet (r) 2.1 (2005) :

  hot spot
      n 1: a place of political unrest and potential violence; "the
           United States cannot police all of the world's hot spots"
           [syn: hot spot, hotspot]
      2: a point of relatively intense heat or radiation [syn: hot   spot
         , hotspot]
      3: a lively entertainment spot [syn: hot spot, hotspot]

hot spot - Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (26 May 2007) :

  hot spot
  
     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 "hot spots" and are good candidates for
     heavy optimisation or hand-hacking.  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 tune, bum, hand-hacking.
  
     2. The active location of a cursor on a bit-map display.  "Put
     the mouse's hot spot on the "ON" widget and click the left
     button."
  
     3. A screen region that is sensitive to mouse clicks, which
     trigger some action.  Hypertext help screens are an example,
     in which a hot spot exists in the vicinity of any word for
     which additional material is available.
  
     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
     busy-wait on the same lock).
  
     5. More generally, any place in a hardware design that turns
     into a performance bottleneck due to resource contention.
  
     [Jargon File]
  
     (1995-02-16)
  

hot spot - Jargon File (4.4.4, 14 Aug 2003) :

  hot spot
   n.
  
     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 hot spots and
     are good candidates for heavy optimization or hand-hacking. 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 tune, hand-hacking.
  
     2. The active location of a cursor on a bit-map display. "Put the
     mouse's hot spot on the `ON' widget and click the left button."
  
     3. A screen region that is sensitive to mouse gestures, which trigger
     some action. World Wide Web pages now provide the canonical
     examples; WWW browsers present hypertext links as hot spots which,
     when clicked on, point the browser at another document (these are
     specifically called hotlinks).
  
     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 busy-wait on the same
     lock).
  
     5. More generally, any place in a hardware design that turns into a
     performance bottleneck due to resource contention.