To quantify how fast we perform the annealing, we need to specify:
: the range of temperatures
: the number of Metropolis iterations at each 
This is known as the annealing schedule. 
and 
are parameters that
can be tuned to improve the performance of SA for different problems. Finding
a good annealing schedule is key to producing good solutions in a reasonable
time.
Often don't need true optimal solution --- just a ``good'' solution, say within 1% of the lowest value. There is a tradeoff between quality of solution and time to find it.