In the classic mechanical slot machines, pulling a handle causes the reels to spin and stop at various positions. If the symbols line up in a winning pattern, a payout is issued. The amount of the payout depends on which pictures appear and how many symbols appear. Modern electrical machines work on a similar principle, although they usually use computer programs to determine whether a spin is a winner or loser.
Slot definition
A narrow, elongated depression, groove, notch, or slit, especially one for receiving something, as a coin or a letter. Also: a place or position, as in a sequence or series; an assignment or job opening. The program received a new slot on the broadcasting schedule. He was given the slot as head copy editor.
A slot is a column of content that can be preemptively borrowed from another query to reduce future delays. Slot borrowing is limited to a small fraction of your total slot capacity. In this way, a queue can be gracefully paused, resumed, and queued up as capacity becomes available to the query. Capacity consumed by a query is not billed directly to you, but rather it’s added to the overall pool of available slot usage. The system tracks this usage and allocates it to the queue based on the queue’s capacity, slot cost variability, and tail latency. This is a much more efficient alternative to using queues and locks. It’s often referred to as “preemptive locking”. See also slot-sharing and queueing.
