Time-constrained programming in Windows NT environment

This paper presents some experiments on Windows NT operating system trying to determine its timing limits. Experiments were concentrated on the context switching abilities in a multithreaded environment. For this purpose a program simulator is written and simulations performed. We detailed some characteristic times for different process priority classes and processor´s speed. In this way we try to determine the usage of this operating system in a time-constrained (real-time) environment. For comparison, simulations were also performed on Windows 98 and Linux operating systems.