How would i go about making an EFICIENT wait method, I am willing to download libraries.
Hope someone can help!
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How would i go about making an EFICIENT wait method, I am willing to download libraries.
Hope someone can help!
I have to admit, the idea makes me giggle. What, do you want to be able to do five minutes of waiting in only three minutes?
The sleep function (which may have some extra letters at the front, depending on your system) will cede time back to the operating system, if it's not being used. You can run a program in the background, if it takes a while to run. Otherwise I have no idea what you could want.
There's an FAQ on this, which suggests what you probably consider an inefficient sleeping mechanism. Cprogramming.com FAQ > Sleeping
But in general this question is platform-specific.
- For Linux: see the sleep() function, "man 3 sleep" (second accuracy), and the usleep() function (millisecond accuracy)
- For Windows: try Sleep() from windows.h (millisecond accuracy)
- For DOS (heaven forbid): delay()
If you're using Boost you have access to platform-independent sleeping functions, but since you're asking this question I'm guessing you're not using Boost.
Finally, you can get better than millisecond accuracy with functions like nanosleep() [Linux], but it's usually not worth it since the operating system will probably keep your process swapped out for coarser periods of time than this.
It's not only nanosleep() that is inaccurate. With windows and unix there is also jitter in the "1 second" or "1 millisecond" accuracy offered by Sleep()/sleep/usleep(). For example, sleeping for 1 millisecond can easily result in an actual pause exceeding 10 or 20 milliseconds due to context switching with other threads or processes.
If you want a specified precision in the length of the pause, it is necessary to use an RTOS (real-time operating system) that is designed for such things and also select hardware appropriately (eg specialised timing circuits).