Lazy loading (or asynchronous loading, or async loading, though I prefer not to call it that since I believe not all lazy loading is asynchronous) is a strategy often employed in software engineering. In general, it means you’re loading the resources only when needed, as opposed to loading everything at once. The strategy is employed in constrained environments, such as when the network is too slow or compute resources are inhibited.
The opposite of lazy loading is called eager loading.
Examples
- Full-resolution images on this site are lazily loaded. They are only downloaded by your browser when you click on the thumbnails on this site. You can refer to this site update post or this Synaptic Saturday post on how I’ve employed this.