[erlang-questions] System timers, now/0, and instrumentation

[Amy Lear]

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 2:02 AM, Magnus Henoch <
magnus.henoch@REDACTED> wrote:

> ----- "Amy Lear" <octopusfluff@REDACTED> wrote:
>
> > The issue here as I understand it is that the system clock itself
> > can't report things in the microsecond range (msdn states the
> > granularity is between 10ms and 15ms:
> >
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.datetimeoffset.utcnow.aspx
> > ), but the real values are being mangled to provide those guaranteed
> > unique values. Given that now/0 is the obvious means of doing
> > measurement for an erlang user -- and in fact the instrumentation
> > tools that ship with erlang also appear to rely on it -- this results
> > in puzzling and undesired behavior.
>
> Have you tried os:timestamp/0?  It's like now/0 but without the
> uniqueness guarantee.  I'm not sure what granularity it has on
> Windows, though.
>
> Hope this helps,
>

Unfortunately, it appears that the granularity of os:timestamp/0 is no finer
than 1 ms, and the minimum resolution appears to be machine-dependant. Msdn
research also suggests that the 1ms resolution timer is slower to access
than the normal system clock, which could matter in some circumstances.
Conversely, dropping the uniqueness facet and being higher resolution than
now/0 does have some potential usefulness, but the erlang documentation
indicates that the provided profiling tools rely on now/0.

My question about instrumentation stands: is there currently a way to do
high resolution profiling in Erlang on Windows? Is the requisite work of
setting up sub-ms resolution timers simply not done/too much work to
attempt?
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