realtime vs fast

Posted Dec 7, 2007 0:52 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
In reply to: Enterprise realtime and cooperative development by sobdk
Parent article: Enterprise realtime and cooperative development

it is also true that real time customers want that worst case time to be as small as possible

I don't think that's particularly true. While it's true that computer users in general want worst case time to be as small as possible, real time people are probably less demanding than non-RT people.

Say you're running an automobile's cruise control. You have to make adjustments every 100 milliseconds. It's essential that your worst case response time be less than 100 milliseconds, but every bit faster than that is just a waste of money.

But in a web server, every bit faster you can serve a page is worth something.