Real-Time System
A computing system whose correctness depends not only on the produced result but also on producing it within a specified timing constraint.
Average throughput is not sufficient evidence for a real-time system. Its design must account for deadlines, jitter, worst-case execution time, scheduler behavior, interrupt latency, and queueing at the tail of the timing distribution. An operation can be fast most of the time and still violate the system requirement through rare delays.
In a hard real-time system, missing a deadline can invalidate the result or system behavior. In a soft real-time system, lateness usually degrades service quality. The distinction determines which delays must be bounded from hardware and scheduling through application queues.
Related: Worst-Case Execution Time, Jitter, Deadline, Capacity Engineering for Real-Time Speech Recognition, VAD, Segment Duration, and Endpointing Trade-offs in Real-Time ASR.