How to make my application wait for a specific time interval if the system is overloaded

I am working on a restaurant project which sends the order of the customer from a android tablet to the kitchen, I want my application to wait for a specific time before sending the order to the kitchen if the server already containing more than 10 orders. In short I want my application to read the number of orders and wait, Kindly guide me if it is possible.

Solution

To wait big intervals of time I recommend you to use AlarmManager

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/AlarmManager.html

The pseudocode for the problem would be something like this:

1 Request to check number of orders
2a If <= 10, send the order
2b If not create an Alarma to wait X minutes and return to 1

Anyway, this has a lot of problems like what happends if a lot of tablet are waiting to send the order, how can the tablets sort the orders? One order can be waiting infinite time because other orders are scheluded before always....

In my opinion you should save all the orders in the server and manage the orders from there. That is the best and simple solution. Then in your server you can always show to the kitchen only 10 orders and manage what order show when one is finished and given to the client. If not, you will need a very complex system to comunicate between the tablets, but for me has no sense the cost of do that