Another goofy programmer question, what's the fastest and most
accurate way of getting the
current time in milisecs within a program? I've been calling
gettimeofday, but was wondering
if there's any better/faster way of doing it?
As far as I know gettimeofday() is the best way. Remember the structure
it fills contains
fields for seconds and microseconds, so if you want milliseconds you're
goina have to do some
math (and probably use a 64bit type). There is also ftime(), but it is
deprecated.
What do you need it for? If you want to benchmark some algorithm or
something I think
you can use clock() (run it once before, once after, subtract and then
divide by
CLOCKS_PER_SEC * 1000)
If you want to run some code after a specified amount of time then you
can use alarm() or
setitimer().
Some boxes also have /dev/rtc which you can be configured (by
ioctl()'s) to send data from
1 time a second all the way up to 2^13 times per second. (2^6 times per
seconds is the max for
non-root users).
--Ray
