Implementing high precision, millisecond-timescale timer

I'm trying to implement a high-precision, millisecond-timescale timer in matlab. Every T seconds, I want to query a camera linked to matlab, and if there is an image in the memory, I want to pull it out. The actual connection to the camera is straightforward - but a problem arises because images are coming in every ~60ms, and need to all be pulled off before another image enters the camera buffer. This essentially means that I need to be checking the camera buffer at least every ~30ms, and ideally every ~5ms.

While MATLAB's built in timer function ostensibly allows millisecond timing, it suffers from poor precision. While in >95% of executions the built in MATLAB timer will indeed pause for ~5ms between runs, in ~5% of cases it hovers around ~30ms, and in ~1% of cases it takes >100ms between executions, which unacceptably kills the performance. I should clarify in MATLAB's defense that simultaneously there are two other timers running (both with 1 s periods), as well as a number of figure windows open, so even though my machine is beefy (16-core, 64GB RAM), there is certainly a lot to be doing all at once. I have tried using timers based on .NET timers (System.Timers.Timer(period)) as well as with the Java sleep function (java.lang.Thread.sleep(period)), both of which should theoretically be more precise, and while both are better than the MATLAB timer (at the cost of being more unwieldy), none are able to consistently achieve <60ms execution delay across thousands of iterations.

Maybe I'm asking for something which is not implementable - but I hope that there is some way to implement a high-precision timer in MATLAB which will continue executing at a ms time-scale even when there are other figures/timers/commands being executed semi-simultaneously. I should maybe clarify that when running just a timer with no other timers/figures open I am able to consistently achieve <60ms execution (and really, consistent <10ms execution for a 5ms timer period). This is possible even when all those timers/figures are open in a different instance of MATLAB, so it seems the problem is to somehow separate the timer from the rest of MATLAB. Any advice or guidance would be appreciated in this regard.

[Walter Roberson]

MATLAB is not designed for Real-Time work, with the exception of the Simulink Real-Time and Simulink Real-Time Desktop products.

[Daniel M]

Nor is Windows a real-time operating system.

[Walter Roberson]

I gather that Simulink Real-Time Desktop installs special drivers to reduce the effects.

[Walter Roberson]

Have you considered putting the image acquisition into a different Worker (Parallel Computing) ? For example with spmd you could labSend the acquired images to a different worker for processing.