answer:Uh, in what context? In a general sense, it updates whatever you’re looking at to take into account new information, such as reloading the fluther main page to see if there’s any new questions (some sites also do this by themselves, like Facebook, but those are relatively rare). But for most tasks other then browsing the internet your computer refreshes whenever it notices new information. There’s also the refresh rate of monitors, which is how quickly the screen refreshes itself. Which is pretty much the same thing, but is the screen updating itself with new information (such as the position of the mouse), and is usually much faster (a standard refresh rate is 60Hz, which means it refreshes 60 times per second). Pretty much none of this has to do with ‘performance’ per se, though a faster screen refresh rate usually means a better picture and lower eye strain.