gettimeofday(), clock_gettime(), timer_gettime()

[John Richard Moser <nigelenki@comcast.net>]

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I'm looking through a few things and noticing some complaints about time
and performance.  Briefly, the following things have come to my attention:

 - gettimeofday() is slow, or so they say, needing several milliseconds
to execute.

 - Apparently clock_gettime() exists, and can get the same information
as gettimeofday(); it gets its stuff in seconds and nanoseconds, which
is a little more precise than gettimeofday()

 - There are also timers that can count down time incrementally


So I have a few simple questions:

 - Is clock_gettime() faster than gettimeofday()? (doubt it)

 - If not, is timer_gettime() faster than gettimeofday() and clock_gettime()

If it turns out clock_gettime() is faster, then wow what the hell?
Otherwise I'm curious on timer_gettime() because it'll be pretty easy to
implement a timer-based clock tracker that adjusts for clock drift (yeah
if I keep timering and adjusting and resetting the timers the overhead
of maintaining the clock in userspace will drift me away from real
gettimeofday() values).

I'm planning out an interval timer based gettimeofday() in userspace as
an object oriented gettimeofday() mimicry; you'd have to pass a
structure to it for a created timer, because otherwise thread safety
would mean mutexes or thread local storage, both of which are slow.

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