c# - Thread.Sleep for less than 1 millisecond

Question

I want to call thread sleep with less than 1 millisecond. I read that neither thread.Sleep nor Windows-OS support that.

What's the solution for that?

For all those who wonder why I need this: I'm doing a stress test, and want to know how many messages my module can handle per second. So my code is:

 // Set the relative part of Second hat will be allocated for each message 
 //For example: 5 messages - every message will get 200 miliseconds 
 var quantum = 1000 / numOfMessages;

 for (var i = 0; i < numOfMessages; i++)
 {
      _bus.Publish(new MyMessage());
      if (rate != 0) 
          Thread.Sleep(quantum);
 }

I'll be glad to get your opinion on that.

Answer 1

You can't do this. A single sleep call will typically block for far longer than a millisecond (it's OS and system dependent, but in my experience, Thread.Sleep(1) tends to block for somewhere between 12-15ms).

Windows, in general, is not designed as a real-time operating system. This type of control is typically impossible to achieve on normal (desktop/server) versions of Windows.

The closest you can get is typically to spin and eat CPU cycles until you've achieved the wait time you want (measured with a high performance counter). This, however, is pretty awful - you'll eat up an entire CPU, and even then, you'll likely get preempted by the OS at times and effectively "sleep" for longer than 1ms...