Search Result for "hot_spot":
Wordnet 3.0

NOUN (3)

1. a place of political unrest and potential violence;
- Example: "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]


WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006):

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]
The Jargon File (version 4.4.7, 29 Dec 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.
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (30 December 2018):

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. 6. wireless hotspot. [Jargon File] (1995-02-16)