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Amortized Analysis

The cost of operations should be evaluated over sequences, not individually; occasional expensive operations spread across many cheap ones yield efficient average behavior.

Tension Addressed

Worst-Case vs. Average-Case Performance (reconciles spikes with overall efficiency)

Recognizable As

Dynamic array resizing, hash table rehashing, splay tree operations, garbage collection pauses, database checkpoint operations

Canonical Sources

Tarjan, Amortized Computational Complexity (1985); CLRS, Introduction to Algorithms (Chapter on Amortized Analysis)

Transfers To

Cloud resource auto-scaling, buffer management, connection pooling, batch processing systems, garbage collection tuning

Amortized analysis enables accepting occasional expensive operations when the long-term average remains efficient, a pattern appearing throughout systems design.