Singleton: How should it be used

Question

Edit: From another question I provided an answer that has links to a lot of questions/answers about singletons: More info about singletons here:

So I have read th

Answer 1

Singletons are handy when you've got a lot code being run when you initialize and object. For example, when you using iBatis when you setup a persistence object it has to read all the configs, parse the maps, make sure its all correct, etc.. before getting to your code.

If you did this every time, performance would be much degraded. Using it in a singleton, you take that hit once and then all subsequent calls don't have to do it.