Yeah, there are finer points to consider to get at an actual bound, and there might be some quirks and infelicities on some platforms. But this is not about com

Yeah, there are finer points to consider to get at an actual bound, and there might be some quirks and infelicities on some platforms. But this is not about competing processes on the system. For matters of asymptotic Analysis the access time is still O(1), i.e. bounded by a constant. If it wasn't, what would it be?