| 1. | a country or region where dangerous or difficult political situations exist or may erupt, esp. where a war, revolution, or a belligerent attitude toward other countries exists or may develop: In the 1960s, Vietnam became a hot spot. |
| 2. | Informal. any area or place of known danger, intrigue, dissension, or instability. |
| 3. | Informal. a nightclub. |
| 4. | Photography. an area of a negative or print revealing excessive light on that part of the subject. |
| 5. | a section of forest or woods where fires frequently occur. |
| 6. | an area hotter than the surrounding surface, as on the shell of a furnace. |
| 7. | Physics. an area of abnormally high radioactivity. |
| 8. | Geology. a region of molten rock below and within the lithosphere that persists long enough to leave a record of uplift and volcanic activity at the earth's surface. Compare plume (def. 10). |
| 9. | Genetics. a chromosome site or a section of DNA having a high frequency of mutation or recombination. |
| 10. | Veterinary Pathology. a moist, raw sore on the skin of a dog or cat caused by constant licking of an irritation from an allergic reaction, tangled coat, fleas, etc. |
[hot-spot] 
| to stop (a forest fire) at a hot spot. |
| hot spot also hot·spot (hŏt'spŏt') n.
|
A place deep within the Earth where hot magma rises to just underneath the surface, creating a bulge and volcanic activity (see volcano). The chain of Hawaiian Islands (see Hawaii) is thought to have been created by the movement of a tectonic plate over a hot spot.
hot spot n.
A region in a gene in which there is a high rate of mutation. Its existence depends on the size of the region concerned, the readiness with which the mutation can be detected, and the possibility that selection against mutants at that point is less than that against mutants elsewhere.
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.
[The Jargon File]
(1995-02-16)
