Clarification on relative speed of an object to timers

I'd like to eventually turn my game into multi-player where relative positioning on both screens should be the same.

However I did notice a concerning asynchronicity between the interval and steps of a timer when the phone is under load on companion mode.

My speed is currently calculated to travel at a relative distance of the hypotenuse distance of the screen (I will eventually make heading of object increase or decrease as it approaches X or Y axis variable on how much the phone varies from the average phone in dimensions)

However my concern raised when I bogged my app down with memory to where it slowed my speed down significantly to a fraction of normal, yet the steps in one of my clocks providing a vibration repeated as frequently as it did before under same conditions. I was under the impression that an interval of 5 steps was the same as a clock interval of 5ms. I was surprised that the slow down only appeared to affect my interval controlling my speed and not also the vibration timer.

Do speed and time intervals not necessarily stay in sync? Can I keep them in check to make them stay relative to each other?