How Does Apex Work?

All Apex runs entirely on-demand on the Force.com platform, as shown in the following architecture diagram:

Apex is compiled, stored, and run entirely on the Force.com platform.

When a developer writes and saves Apex code to the platform, the platform application server first compiles the code into an abstract set of instructions that can be understood by the Apex runtime interpreter, and then saves those instructions as metadata.

When an end-user triggers the execution of Apex, perhaps by clicking a button or accessing a Visualforce page, the platform application server retrieves the compiled instructions from the metadata and sends them through the runtime interpreter before returning the result. The end-user observes no differences in execution time from standard platform requests.