What is the meaning of timer precision and resolution?

c#

Solution

Accuracy and precision are opposing goals, you can't get both. An example of a very accurate timing source is DateTime.UtcNow. It provides absolute time that's automatically corrected for clock rate errors by the kernel, using a timing service to periodically re-calibrate the clock. You probably heard of time.windows.com, the NTP server that most Windows PC use. Very accurate, you can count on less than a second of error over an entire year. But not precise, the value only updates 64 times per second. It is useless to time anything that takes less than a second with any kind of decent precision.

The clock source for Stopwatch is very different. It uses a free running counter that is driven by a frequency source available somewhere in the chipset. This used to be a dedicate crystal running at the color burst frequency (3.579545 MHz) but relentless cost cutting has eliminated that from most PCs. Stopwatch is very precise, you can tell from its Frequency property. You should get something between a megahertz and the cpu clock frequency, allowing you to time down to a microsecond or better. But it is not accurate, it is subject to electronic part tolerances. Particularly mistrust any Frequency beyond a gigahertz, that's derived from a multiplier which also multiplies the error. And beware the Heisenberg principle, starting and stopping the Stopwatch takes non-zero overhead that will affect the accuracy of very short measurements. Another common accuracy problem with Stopwatch is the operating system switching out your thread to allow other code to run. You need to take multiple samples and use the median value.

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