Estimate signal delivery latency to a target process under varying system load.
Standard (non-realtime) POSIX signals are not queued per-instance — multiple pending deliveries of the same signal collapse into one — but realtime signals (SIGRTMIN..SIGRTMAX) delivered via sigqueue(2) do queue, and a backlog of pending signals must each be dequeued and dispatched to a handler before the process resumes normal execution. This calculator models the cumulative delivery latency as queue depth multiplied by per-signal processing time, giving a rough worst-case bound for how long a process might spend just working through a signal backlog.
Signal delivery time
delivery_time_us = signal_queue_depth × processing_time_per_signal
No — standard signals are binary pending flags; sending the same standard signal multiple times before delivery has no cumulative effect. Only realtime signals (SIGRTMIN through SIGRTMAX) queue multiple pending instances, which is what this calculator's queue-depth model best represents.
`cat /proc/PID/status` shows `SigPnd` (thread-pending) and `ShdPnd` (process-wide pending) as hexadecimal bitmasks where each bit corresponds to a signal number.
Signal handler complexity, whether the handler must acquire locks, context-switch overhead if delivery requires waking a sleeping thread, and kernel signal-delivery path overhead (e.g. ptrace interception) all add to the effective per-signal cost beyond the bare minimum kernel dispatch time.