A narrow depression, notch, or aperture, especially one for receiving or admitting something, such as a coin or a letter. Also used as a term in scheduling or calendaring: The program received a new slot on the broadcasting schedule.
In computing, a software memory location, typically used for holding the state of programs and data during execution, in which data is temporarily stored until it is needed for processing. Slot is different from memory cache, which holds frequently accessed data for faster access in future.
A slot is a container for the state of a process, and is shared among many processes. The state of a slot is maintained by the kernel, but can be modified through user applications or libraries. Slots are most often allocated on a per-process basis, although some systems allocate slots based on priority or workload. The amount of allocated slots is a primary determinant of performance.
An elongated, equilaterally symmetrical opening in a door or other structure, used to receive a bolt or lock. (Scotland, Northern England) A device for barring, bolting, or locking a door, box, gate, lid, window, or the like; a lock or latch; also, a slit or aperture. (journalism) An interior opening in a desk, occupied by the chief copy editor.
In field hockey and ice hockey, a rectangular area in front of the net and extending toward the blue line. In football, the area between the last offensive lineman on either side of the center and the wide receiver on that side.
The space in the rotor or stator of a machine for ventilation and insertion of windings. In a computer, a hardware component that stores the operating system and other application software on a disk or hard drive.
A capacity-based model where the project pays for query processing and analytics capacity in slots. In contrast, the on-demand pricing model uses a fixed number of slots by default. Projects on the capacity-based model can purchase more slots if needed to improve query performance.
When using BigQuery’s on-demand model, each reservation gets a fixed number of slots that are used for query processing. BigQuery automatically calculates how many slots a query requires, depending on its size and complexity. The BigQuery on-demand model is architected to scale efficiently with increased resources, and access to more slots is likely to give incremental improvements in performance.
A slot is a logical unit of work in a computing system, usually a microprocessor. A slot in a computer processor may hold instructions, data, or other information. Slots are also used in a more general sense to describe the position of a function within a code-completion or other programming environment. This can be contrasted with a block of code, which is used to represent the whole function. A slot can be subdivided into blocks, or blocked out, to limit the number of instructions that run at any time.
