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[Afghani84]

I am currently trying to understand why the amount of time dwarves are idle between two jobs differs quite substantially. For this, I did some testing and had differences between dwarves (which may be explained through differences in personality) but also for one and the same dwarf.

Here an example:
I had a look at my carpenter and he had idle times in between jobs ranging from 6 up to 280(!) ticks. All of them were within the first few days of an embark, so there was no hunger/thirst/sleepiness present at the time.

Any idea what causes these large ranges? I mean... 280 ticks is 1/4 of a day, so that's pretty long to just hang around doing nothing.

One thing that I noticed was that there seem to be certain ticks where new jobs are started for multiple dwarves. That points towards new jobs waiting for some kind of checkpoint instead of being able to start whenever.
Another one is that the idle time changes if you change the job they are to perform next. So it could be that a dwarf after finishing creating a wheelbarrow will need 280 ticks to start crafting a willow stepladder but only 140 ticks to start a highwood minecart. Whether the different product or raw material has an influence, I do not know...

[mikekchar]

I mean... 280 ticks is 1/4 of a day, so that's pretty long to just hang around doing nothing.

Ob relevant comic: http://dilbert.com/strip/1994-11-23

How are you measuring this?  Just following someone around all day and measuring when they are idle? (this really is eerily like some places I've worked...)