- Computational overhead
In
computer science , overhead is generally considered any combination of excess or indirect computation time, memory, bandwidth, or other resources that are required to be utilized or expended to enable a particular goal. It is a special case ofengineering overhead .For example, an algorithm which caches frequent results for quick retrieval has the overhead of maintaining the memory to store the cached results. In terms ofAlgorithmic efficiency , overhead is often the terms which areasymptotically irrelevant.Example
Consider two algorithms based on input length "n": algorithm "A", which takes operations, and algorithm "B", which takes operations. On short inputs such as or less, algorithm "A" is more efficient. Algorithm "B" is said to have overhead which constitutes the 4 extra operations for each input length and 7 additional operations (overhead may be used to describe all or any part of the additional operations). However, when the input is large, say or more, algorithm "B" is much more efficient. Overhead may also be used to decide whether or not to include features in
software engineering . If developing for anembedded system , a feature that has a high memory overhead may not be included.ee also
Algorithmic efficiency
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