A method is proposed for assessing the temporal resolution of structured illumination microscopy (SIM), by tracking the amplitude of different spatial frequency components over time, and comparing them to a temporally-oscillating ground-truth. This method is used to gain insight into the performance limits of SIM, along with alternative reconstruction techniques (termed ‘rolling SIM’) that claim to improve temporal resolution. Results show that the temporal resolution of SIM varies considerably between low and high spatial frequencies, and that, despite being used in several high profile papers and commercial microscope software, rolling SIM provides no increase in temporal resolution over conventional SIM.