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

Think about the overhead as the time required to manage the threads and coordinate among them. It is a burden if the thread does not have enough task to do. In such a case the overhead cost over come the saved time through using threading and the code takes more time than the sequential one.