500ms is actually a very short interval for heartbeats in modern distributed systems. Kubernetes nodes out of the box send heartbeats every 10s, and Kubernetes

500ms is actually a very short interval for heartbeats in modern distributed systems. Kubernetes nodes out of the box send heartbeats every 10s, and Kubernetes only declares a node as dead when there's no heartbeat for 40s. The relevant timescale here is not CPU time but network time. There's so much jitter in networks that if your heartbeats are on CPU scale (even, say, 100ms) and you wait for 4 missed before declaring dead, you'd just be constantly failing over.