overrun

overrun

the cleared level area at the end of an airport runway

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

overrun

[′ō·və‚rən]

(civil engineering)

A cleared area extending beyond the end of a runway.

(computer science)

The arrival of an amount of data greater than the space allocated to it.

McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

overrun

To run off the end of the runway after touching down on the runway.

An Illustrated Dictionary of Aviation Copyright © 2005 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved

overrun

(1)

A frequent consequence of data arriving faster than it can be consumed, especially in serial line communications. For example, at 9600 baud there is almost exactly one character per millisecond, so if a silo can hold only two characters and the machine takes longer than 2 milliseconds to get to service the interrupt, at least one character will be lost.

overrun

(2)

Also applied to non-serial-I/O communications. "I forgot to pay my electric bill due to mail overrun." "Sorry, I got four phone calls in 3 minutes last night and lost your message to overrun." When thrashing at tasks, the next person to make a request might be told "Overrun!" Compare firehose syndrome.

overrun

(3)

More loosely, may refer to a buffer overflow not necessarily related to processing time (as in overrun screw).

This article is provided by FOLDOC - Free Online Dictionary of Computing (foldoc.org)