What is “overhead”?

Question

I am a student in Computer Science and I am hearing the word "overhead" a lot when it comes to programs and sorts. What does this mean exactly?

Answer 1

The meaning of the word can differ a lot with context. In general, it's resources (most often memory and CPU time) that are used, which do not contribute directly to the intended result, but are required by the technology or method that is being used. Examples:

• Protocol overhead: Ethernet frames, IP packets and TCP segments all have headers, TCP connections require handshake packets. Thus, you cannot use the entire bandwidth the hardware is capable of for your actual data. You can reduce the overhead by using larger packet sizes and UDP has a smaller header and no handshake.
• Data structure memory overhead: A linked list requires at least one pointer for each element it contains. If the elements are the same size as a pointer, this means a 50% memory overhead, whereas an array can potentially have 0% overhead.
• Method call overhead: A well-designed program is broken down into lots of short methods. But each method call requires setting up a stack frame, copying parameters and a return address. This represents CPU overhead compared to a program that does everything in a single monolithic function. Of course, the added maintainability makes it very much worth it, but in some cases, excessive method calls can have a significant performance impact.

Answer 2

You could use a dictionary. The definition is the same. But to save you time, Overhead is work required to do the productive work. For instance, an algorithm runs and does useful work, but requires memory to do its work. This memory allocation takes time, and is not directly related to the work being done, therefore is overhead.

Answer 3

You can check Wikipedia. But mainly when more actions or resources are used. Like if you are familiar with .NET there you can have value types and reference types. Reference types have memory overhead as they require more memory than value types.

Answer 4

its anything other than the data itself, ie tcp flags, headers, crc, fcs etc..

Answer 5

You're tired and cant do any more work. You eat food. The energy spent looking for food, getting it and actually eating it consumes energy and is overhead!

Overhead is something wasted in order to accomplish a task. The goal is to make overhead very very small.

In computer science lets say you want to print a number, thats your task. But storing the number, the setting up the display to print it and calling routines to print it, then accessing the number from variable are all overhead.