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
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.
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.
the one location that all 10,000 processors are trying to read
or write at once (perhaps because they are all doing a
5. More generally, any place in a hardware design that turns
into a performance
bottleneck due to resource contention.
(1995-02-16)