access time
Noun
Meaning
(computer science) the interval between the time data is requested by the system and the time the data is provided by the drive
Source: WordNetSynonyms
Hypernyms
Examples
access time is the sum of seek time and rotational latency and command processing overhead
For purely functional languages, the worst-case slowdown is logarithmic in the number of memory cells used, because mutable memory can be represented by a purely functional data structure with logarithmic access time (such as a balanced tree).
The larger main memory was made possible through the use of 4,096 x 1-bit bipolar RAM ICs with a 25 ns access time.
Per disk capacity was 15 million characters; average access time was 87.5 ms and data transfer rate was 208,000 cps.
The average access time was 30 ms and data transfer rate was 1,074,000 cps.
Since the height of a tree corresponds to the worst-case access time, this means that the actual cost of an operation can be high.