Doing game development I use a lot of timers. Every Update() I check if its time to do something. To make this as light as possible I made a small benchmark to check the speed of different ways of getting time.
When running the code ignore the first 1000-result from each test (used for warmup). Also ignore the number printed after “ignore:”, its just there just to ensure no compiler optimization is done that would affect the result.
Results on my computer:
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1 2 3 |
Test1 1000000: 7ms - Environment.TickCount Test2 1000000: 1392ms - DateTime.Now.Ticks Test3 1000000: 933ms - Stopwatch.ElapsedMilliseconds |
Both DateTime.Now.Ticks (test 2) and Stopwatch.ElapsedMilliseconds (test 3) are considerably slower than Environment.TickCount (test 1), but not enough to be noticeable unless you are performing a lot of calculations. For example I was investigating this because I need a cheap way of getting time in tight game loops. The thing to note is that Environment.TickCount is 32-bit signed which means that after 2147483 seconds of uptime (24,85513 days) the counter overflows and goes to –2147483648 (minus 24,85513 days).
Tip! You can force an overflow to 0 after a max value of 49 days by converting it to an unsigned integer: var value = unchecked((UInt32)Environment.TickCount)
Benchmark code:
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static void Main(string[] args) { Test1(1000); Test1(1000000); Test2(1000); Test2(1000000); Test3(1000); Test3(1000000); Console.ReadLine(); } static void Test1(int c) { var sw = new Stopwatch(); sw.Start(); long sum = 0; for (var i = 0; i < c; i++) { sum += Environment.TickCount; } sw.Stop(); Console.WriteLine("Test1 " + c + ": " + sw.ElapsedMilliseconds + " (ignore: " + sum + ")"); } static void Test2(int c) { var sw = new Stopwatch(); sw.Start(); long sum = 0; for (var i = 0; i < c; i++) { sum += DateTime.Now.Ticks; } sw.Stop(); Console.WriteLine("Test2 " + c + ": " + sw.ElapsedMilliseconds + " (ignore: " + sum + ")"); } static void Test3(int c) { var sw = new Stopwatch(); sw.Start(); long sum = 0; var stopwatch = new Stopwatch(); stopwatch.Start(); for (var i = 0; i < c; i++) { sum += stopwatch.ElapsedMilliseconds; } sw.Stop(); Console.WriteLine("Test3 " + c + ": " + sw.ElapsedMilliseconds + " (ignore: " + sum + ")"); } |