Factors that Degrade Response Time

The problems described in this section increase the response time of the system to varying extents. The degradation can be serious enough to cause an application to miss a critical deadline.

Real-time processing can also impair the operation of aspects of other applications that are active on a system that is running a real-time application. Because real-time processes have higher priority, time-sharing processes can be prevented from running for significant amounts of time. This phenomenon can cause interactive activities, such as displays and keyboard response time, to slow noticeably.