C++ high precision time measurement in Windows

Question

I'm interested in measuring a specific point in time down to the nanosecond using C++ in Windows. Is this possible? If it isn't, is it possible to get the specific time in microseconds at least?. Any library should do, unless I suppose it's possible with managed code. thanks

Answer 1

If you have a threaded application running on a multicore computer QueryPerformanceCounter can (and will) return different values depending on which core the code is executing on. See this MSDN article. (rdtsc has the same problem)

This is not just a theoretical problem; we ran into it with our application and had to conclude that the only reliable time source is timeGetTime which only has ms precision (which fortunately was sufficient in our case). We also tried fixating the thread affinity for our threads to guarantee that each thread always got a consistent value from QueryPerformanceCounter, this worked but it absolutely killed the performance in the application.

To sum things up there isn't a reliable timer on windows that can be used to time thing with micro second precision (at least not when running on a multicore computer).