Timer is a component that has the functionality to trigger a user defined action at regular intervals as configured by the user.
Timer is a component that has the functionality to trigger a user defined action at regular intervals as configured by the user.
Some timers (such as Java Swing timer, WPF DispatcherTimer, WinForms Timer) are also capable of firing they events in GUI thread so there is no need to switch into this thread in order to update the components. Other timers do not have this capability and are more optimized to handle big number of scheduled events.
Depending on how does the scheduler behaves if the new even should be fired when the current event has not yet been fully processed, the timer may be coalescing or non coalescing. A coalescing timer reduces multiple pending events to a single event, reducing the number of events to handle. A non-coalescing timer fires pending overtime events in rapid succession with no delay between them, in order to catch up.
