Does ros rate make sense in a service ?

edit

I have an uncontrolled thread called in my service callback and it looks like the frequency at which it s executed is a bit slow. Is there a way I could put a ros rate in my service in order to force more ressources on my thread within the callback ?

I don't believe a Rate would do what you describe.

ros::Rate is essentially a bookkeeping version of a generic sleep(..) or delay(..).

bookkeeping, in that it measures the time already "used up" between the previous invocation to Rate::sleep() and the current one, compares that to the period it has been configured with, and then only sleeps for the remaining amount of time (ie: the time needed to get as close as possible to the configured period).

See also wiki/roscpp/Overview: Sleeping and Rates.

Rate is not a scheduling mechanism -- or at least: it cannot influence "resource usage" by other threads of execution directly.

If however, you're currently busy-waiting on the completion of your external thread (ie: a tight while(true);), and thereby starving that thread, adding some form of sleep(..) could help (but you could also use a condition variable or some other form of inter-thread communication).

But it would not have to be a Rate per se.

It feels like ros rate is only made for topics.

there is nothing in ros::Rate which makes it specific to topics -- or services, or actions, or anything else really. It's just a slightly more "intelligent" version of sleep(..).

And off-topic (and perhaps pedantic), but: a service server which spins up an additional thread to process an incoming request almost starts to sound like this should actually be an action server.