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

Overhead typically reffers to the amount of extra resources (memory, processor, time, etc.) that different programming algorithms take.

For example, the overhead of inserting into a balanced Binary Tree could be much larger than the same insert into a simple Linked List (the insert will take longer, use more processing power to balance the Tree, which results in a longer percieved operation time by the user).