hot spot

spot of light, beam of light; popular nightclub or entertainment site; site of ongoing warfare or political strife; place on the Earth's surface where molten lava builds up under the surface

HotSpot is the primary Java Virtual Machine for desktops and servers produced by Sun Microsystems. It features techniques such as just-in-time compilation and adaptive optimization designed to improve performance.
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A hot spot is a region of high or special activity within a larger area of low or normal activity; it may refer to: in geologyHotspot (geology), a location above a hot upwelling plume of mantle.in computer scienceHotspot (program), a set of computer instructions executed so frequently that, in older architectures, the memory chips could actually have a spot of higher temperature.Hotspot (database), a frequently accessed data item or object in a databaseHotspot (Wi-Fi), a Wi-Fi access point or area, in particular for connecting to the InternetHotSpot, a Java Virtual Machine from Sun MicrosystemsScreen hotspots, especially in GUI applications, provide areas on which computer-users click or hover for extra information-processing
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Noun
1. a place of political unrest and potential violence; "the United States cannot police all of the world's hot spots"
(synonym) hotspot
(hypernym) geographical area, geographic area, geographical region, geographic region
2. a point of intense heat or radiation
(synonym) hotspot
(hypernym) point
3. a lively entertainment spot
(synonym) hotspot
(hypernym) 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)

the positions around the retail outlet where products sell the best.