Overhead (computing)

In computing, overhead is the consumption of computing resources for aspects that are not directly related to achieving a desired goal. Overhead is required for more general processing and impacts achieving a more focused goal. Overhead manifests as aspects such as slower processing, less memory, less storage capacity, less network bandwidth, and longer latency. Overhead can impact software design with regard to structure, error correction, and feature inclusion. Overhead in computing is a special case of engineering overhead and has the same essential meaning as in business: organizational overhead. A programmer or software engineer may have a choice of several algorithms, encodings, data types or data structures, each of which has known characteristics. When choosing among them, their respective overhead should also be considered. In software engineering, overhead can influence the decision whether or not to include features in new products, or indeed whether to fix bugs. A feature that has a high overhead may not be included – or needs a big financial incentive to do so. Often, even though software providers are well aware of bugs in their products, the payoff of fixing them is not worth the cost, because of the overhead.