Question

I’m using Visual Studio 2012 and C++, I need to call a function every 5 minutes, I’ve managed to do it but it consumes 25% of my CPU which is far from ideal.

The code is as follows,

time_t start;
time_t end;
time(&start);
while (1) {
time(&end);
double dif = difftime (end,start);
if (dif >= 300) { autofunction(); time(&start);} else {} }

Is there a more CPU efficient way to go about calling a function every 5 minutes or any way to slow down my while loop?

Any guidance will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Windows has Sleep(), and for something that happens every 300 seconds, that’s perfectly good. There are also timers in Windows, which potentially takes a timerproc argument, which is a function – but note that this is a C function, not C++, so it mustn’t be a class member function unless it is a static one.