“Part of what makes real-time scheduling so complex and interesting is that it is fundamentally a negotiation between two principles that aren’t fully compatible. These two principles are called responsiveness and throughput: how quickly you can respond to things, and how much you can get done overall. Anyone who’s ever worked in an office environment can readily appreciate the tension between these two metrics. It’s part of the reason there are people whose job it is to answer the phone: they are responsive so that others may have throughput.”