A slot is a narrow opening, groove, notch, or hole for receiving something, as a coin in a coin machine or a mailbox slot at a post office. The term can also refer to a position or job, as in “he was given the slot as chief copy editor.”
In computing, a slot is a reserved portion of computer memory that is used by an application program to store data temporarily until it is needed. The slot is managed by the operating system and is accessible by other programs on the same computer. The operating system allocates the slots for its applications according to each program’s needs and available resources. In general, the number of available slots is limited by the amount of RAM on a machine.
The slot table is an extension work area for the universal testing machine that enables you to secure components and structures that can’t be held with standard grips to the frame during tensile, compression, or flexural tests. Commercially available T-slot nuts slide into inverted T-slots on the table to securely hold specimens and structures during test loading. Bolts or studs can then be threaded into the T-slots to secure them to the machine frame.
A trough, depression, or crevice, especially a narrow one for admitting something, as a coin in a slot machine or a mailbox slot at a public mailbox. Also called a pocket, slit, or aperture.
On some video slot machines, the name for the list of payouts that a player can receive. These are displayed when a player presses the pay table button or touches the pay table icon on the screen. The pay table shows which symbols must appear in a winning combination on the reels to earn the player credits.
In BigQuery, a slot is a unit of CPU time used by a query to process data. Each query executes in a different slot, depending on its size and complexity. You can monitor how many slots each query uses to understand the impact of its workload on your BigQuery capacity and performance. You can use the on-demand pricing model or a capacity-based model to buy additional query processing capacity for your account.
When you buy more slots, your query execution latency improves. Your current queue length remains the same, but the additional slots allow your queries to run in parallel and complete more quickly. Purchasing more slots also allows you to perform large-scale tests and analyze more data in parallel without affecting other queries.
The scheduler enforces equal allocation of slots among projects with running queries within a reservation. Queries that need more than the allocated amount of slots can borrow idle slots from other reservations in your administration project. This might result in short periods when some jobs get a disproportionate share of slots, but the scheduler eventually provides equitable allocations for all reservations. This is sometimes referred to as eventual fairness, and the additional slot usage is not billed directly to you.
