Use of interrupts increases the processor usage of a process. The processor overhead is small if only one interrupt is used and the interrupt is not often caused. However, the overhead is much greater when multiple interrupts are used and greater still when interrupts are queued because an interrupt was disabled.

By contrast, a wait statement does not cause any continuing drain on processor resources. A process that executes a wait statement is simply ignored until the associated event is caused.

Because of these facts, wait statements should be used in preference to interrupts where possible. This is particularly true where the process needs to wait on several events simultaneously. In these cases, a statement that waits on multiple events is more efficient than a statement that waits on multiple interrupts.