資料來源 : WordNet®

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: {hotspot}]
     2: a point of intense heat or radiation [syn: {hotspot}]
     3: a lively entertainment spot [syn: {hotspot}]

資料來源 : Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing

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)