Improve precision (accuracy not important) of timestamping lots of incoming events in C#

Question

0.00/5 (No votes)

See more:

I want to be able to use my Windows clock's precision to the maximum and yet have efficiency in timestamping a lot of events coming in at a high rate of speed. Currently I am using DateTime.Now stored in an array, but I hear this is not the best way to do it. Would a stopwatch implementation be best? For example, instantiate a stopwatch beforehand and then store the elapsed time of the stopwatch rather than sampling DateTime.Nows?

Thank you oh coding Gods!! :)

A BIG thank you as always!

What I have tried:

some event going really really fast:

C#

{

TimeArray[x] = DateTime.Now;

}

Posted 26-Aug-22 10:24am

Admin BTA

Updated 26-Aug-22 19:22pm

PIEBALDconsult

v2

Add a Solution

Comments

PIEBALDconsult 26-Aug-22 16:33pm

I expect that DateTime.Now (or UtcNow) is better than a Stopwatch for that purpose.
I have found that Stopwatch is very poor for very short spans of time.

Admin BTA 26-Aug-22 16:35pm

Thanks PIEBALD!

PIEBALDconsult 27-Aug-22 11:35am

I'm now trying to imagine what events would be that frequent at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum.

1 solution

Add a Solution

Add your solution here

Treat my content as plain text, not as HTML

Preview 0

…

Existing Members

Sign in to your account

...or Join us

Download, Vote, Comment, Publish.

Your Email
Password
Forgot your password?

Your Email
This email is in use. Do you need your password?
Optional Password

I have read and agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
Please subscribe me to the CodeProject newsletters

When answering a question please:

Read the question carefully.
Understand that English isn't everyone's first language so be lenient of bad spelling and grammar.
If a question is poorly phrased then either ask for clarification, ignore it, or edit the question and fix the problem. Insults are not welcome.
Don't tell someone to read the manual. Chances are they have and don't get it. Provide an answer or move on to the next question.

Let's work to help developers, not make them feel stupid.

This content, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)

Graeme_Grant · Answer 1 · 2022-08-26T19:22:00

You could use Unix Timestamps:

C#

// Get the offset from current time in UTC time
DateTimeOffset dto = new DateTimeOffset(DateTime.UtcNow);

// Get the unix timestamp in seconds
string unixTime = dto.ToUnixTimeSeconds().ToString();

// Get the unix timestamp in seconds, and add the milliseconds
string unixTimeMilliSeconds = dto.ToUnixTimeMilliseconds().ToString();

Or you could use Epoch, commonly used in Web APIs:

C#

var epoch = DateTime2Epoch(DateTime.Now);

int DateTime2Epoch(DateTime dateTime)
{
    TimeSpan t = dateTime.ToUniversalTime() - new DateTime(1970, 1, 1);
    int secondsSinceEpoch = (int)t.TotalSeconds;
    return secondsSinceEpoch;
}

For higher precision, you could use:

C#

var ticks = DateTime.Now.Ticks