processingTime

Processing time is the duration required to complete a specific unit of work by a system or process. In manufacturing, it is the elapsed time from the start of a process step to its completion for a single item, excluding setup. In computing and information systems, it refers to the time a processor or service takes to perform all operations to complete a task, often measured from task submission to result generation, and does not include queueing or I/O delays unless explicitly defined as turnaround time or response time.

The term is often distinguished from turnaround time (total elapsed time from submission to completion) and from latency (delay introduced by waiting or propagation).

Measurement can be deterministic or stochastic; for a given task, the processing time may be a fixed value or a random variable with a distribution. In performance engineering, processing time is a key metric used in capacity planning, bottleneck analysis, and latency budgets. It can be influenced by algorithmic complexity, hardware speed, memory availability, I/O bandwidth, and contention, as well as software optimizations such as parallelism, caching, and just-in-time compilation. In databases and web services, processing time typically refers to the time spent executing a query or request, excluding time spent waiting on network transfer.

Understanding processing time supports decision making in scheduling, resource allocation, and service level agreements. It is commonly tracked in monitoring systems via instrumentation that records start and end timestamps for tasks, enabling calculations of average, median, and percentile processing times.