C++ Cross-Platform High-Resolution Timer

Updated answer for an old question:

In C++11 you can portably get to the highest resolution timer with:

#include <iostream>
#include <chrono>
#include "chrono_io"

int main()
{
    typedef std::chrono::high_resolution_clock Clock;
    auto t1 = Clock::now();
    auto t2 = Clock::now();
    std::cout << t2-t1 << '\n';
}

Example output:

74 nanoseconds

“chrono_io” is an extension to ease I/O issues with these new types and is freely available here.

There is also an implementation of <chrono> available in boost (might still be on tip-of-trunk, not sure it has been released).

Update

This is in response to Ben’s comment below that subsequent calls to std::chrono::high_resolution_clock take several milliseconds in VS11. Below is a <chrono>-compatible workaround. However it only works on Intel hardware, you need to dip into inline assembly (syntax to do that varies with compiler), and you have to hardwire the machine’s clock speed into the clock:

#include <chrono>

struct clock
{
    typedef unsigned long long                 rep;
    typedef std::ratio<1, 2800000000>          period; // My machine is 2.8 GHz
    typedef std::chrono::duration<rep, period> duration;
    typedef std::chrono::time_point<clock>     time_point;
    static const bool is_steady =              true;

    static time_point now() noexcept
    {
        unsigned lo, hi;
        asm volatile("rdtsc" : "=a" (lo), "=d" (hi));
        return time_point(duration(static_cast<rep>(hi) << 32 | lo));
    }

private:

    static
    unsigned
    get_clock_speed()
    {
        int mib[] = {CTL_HW, HW_CPU_FREQ};
        const std::size_t namelen = sizeof(mib)/sizeof(mib[0]);
        unsigned freq;
        size_t freq_len = sizeof(freq);
        if (sysctl(mib, namelen, &freq, &freq_len, nullptr, 0) != 0)
            return 0;
        return freq;
    }

    static
    bool
    check_invariants()
    {
        static_assert(1 == period::num, "period must be 1/freq");
        assert(get_clock_speed() == period::den);
        static_assert(std::is_same<rep, duration::rep>::value,
                      "rep and duration::rep must be the same type");
        static_assert(std::is_same<period, duration::period>::value,
                      "period and duration::period must be the same type");
        static_assert(std::is_same<duration, time_point::duration>::value,
                      "duration and time_point::duration must be the same type");
        return true;
    }

    static const bool invariants;
};

const bool clock::invariants = clock::check_invariants();

So it isn’t portable. But if you want to experiment with a high resolution clock on your own intel hardware, it doesn’t get finer than this. Though be forewarned, today’s clock speeds can dynamically change (they aren’t really a compile-time constant). And with a multiprocessor machine you can even get time stamps from different processors. But still, experiments on my hardware work fairly well. If you’re stuck with millisecond resolution, this could be a workaround.

This clock has a duration in terms of your cpu’s clock speed (as you reported it). I.e. for me this clock ticks once every 1/2,800,000,000 of a second. If you want to, you can convert this to nanoseconds (for example) with:

using std::chrono::nanoseconds;
using std::chrono::duration_cast;
auto t0 = clock::now();
auto t1 = clock::now();
nanoseconds ns = duration_cast<nanoseconds>(t1-t0);

The conversion will truncate fractions of a cpu cycle to form the nanosecond. Other rounding modes are possible, but that’s a different topic.

For me this will return a duration as low as 18 clock ticks, which truncates to 6 nanoseconds.

I’ve added some “invariant checking” to the above clock, the most important of which is checking that the clock::period is correct for the machine. Again, this is not portable code, but if you’re using this clock, you’ve already committed to that. The private get_clock_speed() function shown here gets the maximum cpu frequency on OS X, and that should be the same number as the constant denominator of clock::period.

Adding this will save you a little debugging time when you port this code to your new machine and forget to update the clock::period to the speed of your new machine. All of the checking is done either at compile-time or at program startup time. So it won’t impact the performance of clock::now() in the least.