calculating system clock resolution

[Steven D'Aprano]

Ah, drat -- hit the wrong key and sent the last post before I had finished
writing it... the following is what I *intended* to send.

On Fri, 07 Apr 2006 16:39:40 -0700, jUrner wrote:

> Maybe it was not too clear what I was trying to point out.
> 
> I have to calculate the time time.time() requires to return the next
> tick of the clock.
> Should be about 0.01ms but this may differ from os to os.

I suspect that Python isn't quite fast enough to give an accurate measure
for this, but I could be wrong.

You can try this:

def calc_time_res():
    now = time.time
    start = now()
    x = start
    while start == x:
        x = now()
    print x - start

Trying it, I get a fairly small number:

>>> calc_time_res()
1.50203704834e-05
>>> calc_time_res()
1.50203704834e-05
>>> calc_time_res()
1.50203704834e-05

This is Python 2.3 running under Fedora Core 2 Linux.


-- 
Steven.