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Asked: 2026-05-19T16:57:38+00:00

I am working with .NET but I need to communicate with a logging service,

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I am working with .NET but I need to communicate with a logging service, unix based, that expects seconds and microseconds since the Unix epoch time. The seconds is easily retrievable doing something like:

DateTime UnixEpoch = new DateTime(1970, 1, 1);
TimeSpan time = DateTime.UtcNow() - UnixEpoch
int seconds = (int) time.TotalSeconds

however, I am unsure how to calculate the microseconds. I could use the TotalMilliseconds property and convert it to microseconds but I believe that defeats the purpose of using microseconds as a precise measurement. I have looked into using the StopWatch class but it doesn’t seem like I can seed it with a time (Unix Epoch for example).

Thanks.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Use the Ticks property to get the most fine-grained level of detail. A tick is 100ns, so divide by 10 to get to microseconds.

    However, that talks about the representation precision – it doesn’t talk about the accuracy at all. Given the coarse granularity of DateTime.UtcNow I wouldn’t expect it to be particularly useful. See Eric Lippert’s blog post about the difference between precision and accuracy for more information.

    You may want to start a stopwatch at a known time, and basically add its time to the “start point”. Note that “ticks” from Stopwatch doesn’t mean the same as TimeSpan.Ticks.

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