How quickly depends on multiple things:
- latencies in the hardware of the CPU and the interrupt controller (if any)
- the CPU clock rate (often, events (or responses to them) occur no faster than that)
- the speed with which the CPU can access the needed memory (system tables (e.g. the interrupt vector table, but there may be segment tables and page tables and others), the stack (the interrupted code instruction pointer will be typically saved on the stack, so the ISR can return to it), the ISR code itself and all the data it uses). Obviously, code, data and TLB caches are going to contribute here.
- the time needed for the ISR to do its work, especially if ISRs cannot preempt each other and so concurrent interrupts have to be serialized.
- the interrupt priorities. Often, different interrupt sources are assigned different priorities. For example, you'd want non-maskable interrupts, machine-check interrupts (basically, interrupts reporting serious hardware issues) and timer interrupts to have higher priority than, say, keyboard interrupts. In priority-based interrupt handling, all interrupts, whose priority is lower than the interrupt being currently serviced, will have to "wait". So, if you have lots of high priority interrupts, lower priority interrupts can be serviced with noticeable and varying lag. The extreme case would be when high priority interrupts keep coming endlessly. This may be due to improper design or hardware malfunction.
- communication and interaction with other CPUs. In MP systems, interrupt handlers may sometimes take spinlocks to get exclusive access to a resource shared among multiple CPUs. If there's contention, the ISR will wait and all other interrupts (or all interrupts of lower priority) won't be serviced until the current ISR finishes its work.
That's a general answer to a general question.
EDIT: I've forgot to mention one more thing. There exist some odd CPUs in which certain instructions are repeatable (think of x86's rep movsb
) and interrupts can't start getting serviced until the repeated instruction fully finishes, which may take time equivalent to executing some 1000 or even more simple individual instructions. So, despite interrupts being enabled, there may be some CPU quirks not letting the ISRs to start running. One of such CPUs is TI's TMS320C54xx. With it you have to careful around FIR filter code. If the filter is long and is implemented as a repeated MAC instruction, it will introduce a latency in interrupt servicing.