hrtime

High resolution timer functions in Go

Rationale

The resolution of the time functions in the standard golang library can have poor resolution (at or greater than 1 ms). This library aims to provide higher resolution timer functions. Currently, it uses the hrtimer syscall interface, which means it will certainly only work on POSIX systems, and likely not all (for example, it does not work on Darwin/MacOS).

tick Timer

This module provides a tick timer based on hrtimer using a monotonic clock:

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"time"

	"github.com/blorticus-go/hrtime"
)

func main() {
	ticker := hrtime.NewMonotonicTicker(100 * time.Microsecond)

	if err := ticker.Start(); err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}

	tickCounter := 0
	for {
		<-ticker.C
        go doSomethingUseful()
		tickCounter++
		if tickCounter == 100000 { // 10 seconds have elapsed
			break
		}
	}

	ticker.Stop()
}

Keep in mind that a call to the ticker channel is not guaranteed to happen within a single interval period. When the resolution is small (as in this example, with a resolution of 100 µs), the amount of processing time surrounding the channel functions can sometimes (and at small enough resolutions, often or always) take longer than resolution period. The channel returns the number of ticks that occurred since the last channel read.

It is also important to note that implementations of hrtimer don't have infinite granularity. On any platform, you will eventually hit the minimum tick limit.