'Thread.Sleep for less than 1 millisecond

I want to call thread sleep with less than 1 millisecond. I read that neither thread.Sleep nor Windows-OS support that.

What's the solution for that?

For all those who wonder why I need this: I'm doing a stress test, and want to know how many messages my module can handle per second. So my code is:

 // Set the relative part of Second hat will be allocated for each message 
 //For example: 5 messages - every message will get 200 miliseconds 
 var quantum = 1000 / numOfMessages;

 for (var i = 0; i < numOfMessages; i++)
 {
      _bus.Publish(new MyMessage());
      if (rate != 0) 
          Thread.Sleep(quantum);
 }

I'll be glad to get your opinion on that.

c++sharp.netmultithreading


Solution 1:[1]

You can't do this. A single sleep call will typically block for far longer than a millisecond (it's OS and system dependent, but in my experience, Thread.Sleep(1) tends to block for somewhere between 12-15ms).

Windows, in general, is not designed as a real-time operating system. This type of control is typically impossible to achieve on normal (desktop/server) versions of Windows.

The closest you can get is typically to spin and eat CPU cycles until you've achieved the wait time you want (measured with a high performance counter). This, however, is pretty awful - you'll eat up an entire CPU, and even then, you'll likely get preempted by the OS at times and effectively "sleep" for longer than 1ms...

Solution 2:[2]

The code below will most definitely offer a more precise way of blocking, rather than calling Thread.Sleep(x); (although this method will block the thread, not put it to sleep). Below we are using the StopWatch class to measure how long we need to keep looping and block the calling thread.

using System.Diagnostics;

private static void NOP(double durationSeconds)
{
    var durationTicks = Math.Round(durationSeconds * Stopwatch.Frequency);
    var sw = Stopwatch.StartNew();

    while (sw.ElapsedTicks < durationTicks)
    {

    }
}

Example usage,

private static void Main()
{
    NOP(5); // Wait 5 seconds.

    Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");

    Console.ReadLine();
}

Solution 3:[3]

Why?
Usually there are a very limited number of CPUs and cores on one machine - you get just a small number if independent execution units.

From the other hands there are a number of processes and many more threads. Each thread requires some processor time, that is assigned internally by Windows core processes. Usually Windows blocks all threads and gives a certain amount of CPU core time to particular threads, then it switches the context to other threads.

When you call Thread.Sleep no matter how small you kill the whole time span Windows gave to the thread, as there is no reason to simply wait for it and the context is switched straight away. It can take a few ms when Windows gives your thread some CPU next time.

What to use?
Alternatively, you can spin your CPU, spinning is not a terrible thing to do and can be very useful. It is for example used in System.Collections.Concurrent namespace a lot with non-blocking collections, e.g.:

SpinWait sw = new SpinWait();
sw.SpinOnce();

Solution 4:[4]

Most of the legitimate reasons for using Thread.Sleep(1) or Thread.Sleep(0) involve fairly advanced thread synchronization techniques. Like Reed said, you will not get the desired resolution using conventional techniques. I do not know for sure what it is you are trying to accomplish, but I think I can assume that you want to cause an action to occur at 1 millisecond intervals. If that is the case then take a look at multimedia timers. They can provide resolution down to 1ms. Unfortunately, there is no API built into the .NET Framework (that I am aware of) that taps into this Windows feature. But you can use the interop layer to call directly into the Win32 APIs. There are even examples of doing this in C# out there.

Solution 5:[5]

In the good old days, you would use the "QueryPerformanceTimer" API of Win32, when sub milisecond resolution was needed.

There seems to be more info on the subject over on Code-Project: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/highperformancetimercshar.aspx

This won't allow you to "Sleep()" with the same resolution as pointed out by Reed Copsey.

Edit: As pointed out by Reed Copsey and Brian Gideon the QueryPerfomanceTimer has been replaced by Stopwatch in .NET

Sources

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Source: Stack Overflow

Solution Source
Solution 1 Reed Copsey
Solution 2
Solution 3 oleksii
Solution 4 Community
Solution 5

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