intervalsevery

Intervalsevery is a term used in computer science to describe a pattern for executing a task at regular, fixed intervals. It is commonly used to implement timers, polling loops, data sampling, and time-driven animations.

Mechanism and timing: An interval duration is defined (for example, 50 milliseconds), and a scheduler aims to fire the task at times t0 + n × duration. Real-world execution time, system load, and clock granularity can introduce drift. Implementations often apply drift compensation or adaptive pacing to keep long-run timing accurate, ensuring the high-level interval remains consistent despite occasional delays.

Key features: Typical interval-based schedulers support various time bases such as monotonic clocks, and provide controls to start, stop, pause, and resume. They may allow single-shot or recurring tasks, nested intervals, and jitter controls. Many libraries strive to present a uniform API across environments (browsers, servers, and native platforms) to simplify cross-platform usage. Some offer fine-grained control over how drift is handled and how tasks are canceled.

Use cases: Intervalsevery is commonly applied to real-time data sampling, game and UI animation tick rates, periodic health checks, and synchronization tasks in distributed systems where actions must occur at predictable intervals.

Relation to other concepts: It differs from calendar-based scheduling tools like cron in granularity and immediacy. Intervalsevery emphasizes regular, high-frequency firing and deterministic timing, whereas cron focuses on time-of-day or date-based triggers. Implementations vary across languages, but the core idea remains the same: trigger a callback at a specified interval with mechanisms to manage drift and accuracy.