Synchronous vs. Asynchronous updates in Real-time applications

I am looking to update an application in which I have the ability to update synchronously or asynchronously. For the real-time nature of the app, which currently ranges from a synchronous execution of methods ranging in frequencies from 1-60Hz, do you see any advantages into asynchronously updating due to us开发者_高级运维er input? Or should I wait until the next synchronous cycle to incorporate the change?

My thoughts so far:

The current advantage that I see with introducing an asynchronous update is that if a member in a 1Hz method is updated, the 60Hz method may execute 50+ times with the old value. I know this is still a relatively short amount of time to a user ( < 1 second), but to me the principal of continuing calcs with bad values for 50+ reps seems bad.

The current advantage that I see with keeping it synchronous is the ease of readability for the flow of code execution.

Are there any repercussions I am not thinking of?

It's a little hard to say without more of a sense of your application. In general, I'd say it's preferable to stay synchronous for a real-time application where possible, just because it makes it easier to reason about timeliness (often the hardest thing to reason about.) If you can reasonably make something periodic, make it periodic and thank your lucky stars.

Moving to a partially synchronous or async model does have some advantages. Like you say, it might feel less than aesthetic to continue operating on stale data. But consider: this is a real-time application. Presumably you have a requirement that states what the update latency for data input to your 60Hz task must be. Like in any general purpose computing performance setting, don't go to extra work to do better than that unless it's easy; it's clearer in the implementation; or it becomes necessary to achieve correctness.

So, all that said, there are no hard and fast rules. Make sure your rationale is both written down and reflected in your design.