Question

I need prety simple thing

while (true) {
    DoJob();
    // wait 1 ms
}

Should I just use Thread.Sleep(1)?
I’m not sure about using Timer because it seems overhead of Timer itself is a little bit more than 1 ms.

Update: I need this delay to be sure that I received the most recent information from network, it’s trading software. I need to do something and then I have to wait 1 ms to see what happens. I can wait 1.5 ms, but not 3 ms, that would be too much. It’s ok to wait rarely 5 or 10 ms, but in general it should be ~1 ms

Answer 1

Edit — corrected “most resolution you will get from sleep to about 20 ms, instead of 100 ms

About the most resolution that you will get out of sleep is 100 milliseconds, even if you pass Sleep(1).

For what it’s worth, a timer may be more efficient for this — especially if you have more than 1 thread sleeping (System.Threading.Timer will will use as few threads as it needs to if you allocate multiple timers, they will share a timing thread) (this from Joe Duffy’s Concurrent Programming book)

But more importantly, what are you trying to do? If you are polling — need to wait for something to happen, you may be able to use a more efficient means of doing it. If you just need to fire off a task every so often, A timer is probably going to be your best bet.

If you are only want to stop for a millisecond, may I ask why? Are you just trying to make sure that your thread yields to other processes?