Hands-On System Programming with Linux

Figuring the overrun

Let's say we use signaling as the event-notification mechanism to tell us that a POSIX timer has expired, and let's say that the timer-expiry period is a very small amount of time (say, a few tens of microseconds); for example, 100 microseconds. This implies that every 100 microseconds the signal will be delivered to the target process!

In these circumstances, it's quite reasonable to expect that the process, being delivered the same ever-repeating signal at such a high rate, cannot possibly handle it. We also know from our knowledge on signaling that, in cases precisely like this, using a real-time signal would be far superior to using a regular Unix signal, as the OS has the ability to queue real-time signals but not ...