  The capacity under strong asynchronism was recently shown to be essentially
unaffected by the imposed output sampling rate $\rho$ and decoding delay
$d$---the elapsed time between when information is available at the transmitter
and when it is decoded. This paper examines this result in the finite
blocklength regime and shows that, by contrast with capacity, the second order
term in the rate expansion is sensitive to both parameters. When the receiver
must exactly locate the sent codeword, that is $d=n$ where $n$ denotes
blocklength, the second order term in the rate expansion is of order
$\Theta(1/\rho)$ for any $\rho=O(1/\sqrt{n})$---and $\rho =\omega(1/n)$ for
otherwise reliable communication is impossible. However, if
$\rho=\omega(1/\sqrt{n})$ then the second order term is the same as under full
sampling and is given by a standard $O(\sqrt{n})$ term whose dispersion
constant only depends on the level of asynchronism. This second order term also
corresponds to the case of the slightly relaxed delay constraint $d\leq
n(1+o(1))$ for any $\rho=\omega(1/n)$.
