Access Time

Access time is the time delay or latency between a request to an electronic system, and the access being completed or the requested data returned.

  • In a telecommunications system, access time is the delay between the start of an access attempt and successful access. Access time values are measured only on access attempts that result in successful access.
  • In a computer, it is the time interval between the instant at which an instruction control unit initiates a call for data or a request to store data, and the instant at which delivery of the data is completed or the storage is started.


Famous quotes containing the words access and/or time:

    “The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition. In America, this system is carried to the point where a man who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency than anyone else thereby gains social access to the President of the United States.”
    —C. Wright Mills (1916–1962)

    “He said, truly, that the reason why such greatly superior numbers quailed before him was, as one of his prisoners confessed, because they lacked a cause,—a kind of armor which he and his party never lacked. When the time came, few men were found willing to lay down their lives in defense of what they knew to be wrong; they did not like that this should be their last act in this world.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)