Learn English – Adjective to describe a task that will take a long time because it’s a lot of work and/or a lot of waiting

single-word-requests

I want to describe a software task (unit of work) that could take a long time, either because it's a lot of operations (processing time) or because it has to do communication with the network and there will be some waiting involved due to latency of the communication before the task can finish.

Without making the question too technical, let's use the analogy of a person who has to do a job that will take a long time, not necessarily because it's a lot of work, but because there are uncertainties in how long it will take to get the work done.

A lengthy task is close to what I want. However, I'm hesitant that it might convey more the "hard work" meaning (lots of work), and readers won't think of the other case (where latency is the reason it takes long). Is there a single-word adjective to capture this idea?

Best Answer

Time-consuming:

It was a time-consuming process, so he hired a professional to do it.

Closer to software:

Time-consuming operations should be run in separate background tasks.

Edit: Android calls them longer-running, meaning CPU-intensive and/or blocking:

A Service is an application component representing either an application's desire to perform a longer-running operation while not interacting with the user or to supply functionality for other applications to use. [...] if your service is going to do any CPU intensive (such as MP3 playback) or blocking (such as networking) operations, it should spawn its own thread in which to do that work.

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