Oops. In the above I said the system shouldn't pause ever. This is silly of course. What I meant to say is that it shouldn't pause except when hit with hard res

Oops. In the above I said the system shouldn't pause ever. This is silly of course. What I meant to say is that it shouldn't pause except when hit with hard resource limits. Loading from the disk or performing an expensive calculation will take some time of course. But there shouldn't be random pauses when interacting with something that ought to be fit into memory. Modern systems are full of pre-emption, GC pauses and other non-determinisms.