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Asked: 2026-05-14T03:57:44+00:00

At MSDN page for Stopwatch class I discovered link to interesting article which makes

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At MSDN page for Stopwatch class I discovered link to interesting article which makes following statement about Stopwatch:

However there are some serious issues:

  • This can be unreliable on a PC with multiple processors. Due to a bug in
    the BIOS, Start() and Stop() must be executed on the same processor to get
    a correct result.

  • This is unreliable on processors that do not have a constant clock
    speed (most processors can reduce the clock speed to conserve
    energy). This is explained in detail here.

I am little confused. I’ve seen tons of examples of using Stopwatch and nobody mention this drawbacks. How serious is this? Should I avoid using Stopwatch?

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  1. Editorial Team

    It is not broken it just has limitations. For most purposes (read: informal micro-benchmarking) StopWatch is fine to use simply because it is good enough for informal testing. For more formal purposes you would most likely want to roll your own instrumentation code as you would that much more invested in getting proper results.

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