runtime: time.Sleep takes more time than expected

[egonelbre]

This seems to be a regression with Go 1.16 time.Sleep.

What version of Go are you using (go version)?

$ go version
go version go1.16 windows/amd64

Does this issue reproduce with the latest release?

Yes.

What operating system and processor architecture are you using (go env)?

go env Output

$ go env
set GO111MODULE=
set GOARCH=amd64
set GOBIN=
set GOCACHE=Z:\gocache
set GOENV=C:\Users\egone\AppData\Roaming\go\env
set GOEXE=.exe
set GOFLAGS=
set GOHOSTARCH=amd64
set GOHOSTOS=windows
set GOINSECURE=
set GOMODCACHE=F:\Go\pkg\mod
set GONOPROXY=
set GONOSUMDB=
set GOOS=windows
set GOPATH=F:\Go
set GOPRIVATE=
set GOPROXY=https://proxy.golang.org,direct
set GOROOT=c:\go
set GOSUMDB=sum.golang.org
set GOTMPDIR=
set GOTOOLDIR=c:\go\pkg\tool\windows_amd64
set GOVCS=
set GOVERSION=go1.16
set GCCGO=gccgo
set AR=ar
set CC=gcc
set CXX=g++
set CGO_ENABLED=1
set GOMOD=f:\temp\sleep\go.mod
set CGO_CFLAGS=-g -O2
set CGO_CPPFLAGS=
set CGO_CXXFLAGS=-g -O2
set CGO_FFLAGS=-g -O2
set CGO_LDFLAGS=-g -O2
set PKG_CONFIG=pkg-config
set GOGCCFLAGS=-m64 -mthreads -fmessage-length=0 -fdebug-prefix-map=Z:\Temp\go-build3014714148=/tmp/go-build -gno-record-gcc-switches

What did you do?

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"time"

	"github.com/loov/hrtime"
)

func main() {
	b := hrtime.NewBenchmark(100)
	for b.Next() {
		time.Sleep(50 * time.Microsecond)
	}
	fmt.Println(b.Histogram(10))
}

hrtime is a package that uses RDTSC for time measurements.

Output on Windows 10:

> go1.16 run .
  avg 15.2ms;  min 55.3µs;  p50 15.5ms;  max 16.3ms;
  p90 16.1ms;  p99 16.3ms;  p999 16.3ms;  p9999 16.3ms;
     55.3µs [  2] █
        2ms [  0]
        4ms [  0]
        6ms [  0]
        8ms [  0]
       10ms [  1] ▌
       12ms [  0]
       14ms [ 75] ████████████████████████████████████████
       16ms [ 22] ███████████▌
       18ms [  0]

> go1.15.8 run .
  avg 1.03ms;  min 63.9µs;  p50 1ms;  max 2.3ms;
  p90 1.29ms;  p99 2.3ms;  p999 2.3ms;  p9999 2.3ms;
     63.9µs [  1] ▌
      500µs [ 47] ███████████████████████████████████████
        1ms [ 48] ████████████████████████████████████████
      1.5ms [  1] ▌
        2ms [  3] ██
      2.5ms [  0]
        3ms [  0]
      3.5ms [  0]
        4ms [  0]
      4.5ms [  0]

Output on Linux (Debian 10):

$ go1.16 run test.go
  avg 1.06ms;  min 1.06ms;  p50 1.06ms;  max 1.08ms;
  p90 1.07ms;  p99 1.08ms;  p999 1.08ms;  p9999 1.08ms;
     1.06ms [  4] █▌
     1.07ms [ 84] ████████████████████████████████████████
     1.07ms [  7] ███
     1.08ms [  3] █
     1.08ms [  1]
     1.09ms [  1]
     1.09ms [  0]
      1.1ms [  0]
      1.1ms [  0]
     1.11ms [  0]

$ go1.15.8 run test.go
  avg 86.7µs;  min 57.3µs;  p50 83.6µs;  max 132µs;
  p90 98.3µs;  p99 132µs;  p999 132µs;  p9999 132µs;
     57.3µs [  2] █
       60µs [  1] ▌
       70µs [ 13] ████████
       80µs [ 64] ████████████████████████████████████████
       90µs [ 11] ██████▌
      100µs [  2] █
      110µs [  1] ▌
      120µs [  3] █▌
      130µs [  3] █▌
      140µs [  0]

The time granularity shouldn't be that bad even for Windows. So, there might be something going wrong somewhere.

[egonelbre]

It looks like this happened in 8fdc79e. https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/232298

CC: @ChrisHines

[bcmills]

That same CL shook out a number of kernel and runtime bugs in various configurations. (See previously #43067, #42515, #42237; cc @prattmic.)

[ianlancetaylor]

CC @mknyszek @aclements

[prattmic]

This is reproducible with a trivial benchmark in time package:

func BenchmarkSimpleSleep(b *testing.B) {
       for i := 0; i < b.N; i++ {
               Sleep(50*Microsecond)
       }
}

amd64/linux, before/after http://golang.org/cl/232298:

name            old time/op  new time/op   delta
SimpleSleep-12  86.9µs ± 0%  609.8µs ± 5%  +601.73%  (p=0.000 n=10+9)

[prattmic]

For reference, across different sleep times:

name                  old time/op  new time/op   delta
SimpleSleep/1ns-12     460ns ± 3%    479ns ± 1%    +4.03%  (p=0.000 n=10+9)
SimpleSleep/100ns-12   466ns ± 3%    476ns ± 2%    +2.35%  (p=0.001 n=10+9)
SimpleSleep/500ns-12  6.47µs ±11%   6.70µs ± 5%      ~     (p=0.105 n=10+10)
SimpleSleep/1µs-12    10.3µs ±10%   12.2µs ±13%   +18.23%  (p=0.000 n=10+10)
SimpleSleep/10µs-12   81.9µs ± 1%  502.5µs ± 4%  +513.45%  (p=0.000 n=10+10)
SimpleSleep/50µs-12   87.0µs ± 0%  622.9µs ±18%  +615.69%  (p=0.000 n=8+10)
SimpleSleep/100µs-12   179µs ± 0%   1133µs ± 1%  +533.52%  (p=0.000 n=8+10)
SimpleSleep/500µs-12   592µs ± 0%   1137µs ± 1%   +91.97%  (p=0.000 n=10+10)
SimpleSleep/1ms-12    1.12ms ± 2%   1.14ms ± 1%    +1.36%  (p=0.000 n=9+10)
SimpleSleep/10ms-12   10.2ms ± 0%   10.3ms ± 0%    +0.79%  (p=0.000 n=9+9)

[prattmic]

Looking at the 100µs, the immediate problem is the delay resolution in netpoll.

Prior to http://golang.org/cl/232298, 95% of timer expirations in the 100µs case are detected by sysmon, which calls startm to wake an M to handle the timer (though this is not a particularly efficient approach).

After http://golang.org/cl/232298, this path is gone and the wakeup must come from netpoll (assuming all Ms are parked/blocked). netpoll on Linux only has 1ms resolution, so it must sleep at least that long before detecting the timer.

I'm not sure why I'm seeing ~500µs on the 10µs and 50µs benchmarks, but I may have bimodal distribution where ~50% of cases a spinning M is still awake long enough to detect the timer before entering netpoll.

I'm also not sure why @egonelbre is seeing ~14ms on Windows, as that also appears to have 1ms resolution on netpoll.

[prattmic]

I think the ideal fix to this would be to increase the resolution of netpoll. Even for longer timers, this limited resolution will cause slight skew to timer delivery (though of course there are no real-time guarantees).

As it happens, Linux v5.11 includes epoll_pwait2 which switches the timeout argument to a timespec for nanosecond resolution. Unfortunately, Linux v5.11 was released ... 3 days ago, so availability is not widespread to say the least.

In the past, I've also prototyped changing the netpoll timeout to being controlled by a timerfd (with the intention of being able to adjust the timer earlier without a full netpollBreak). That could be an option as well.

Both of these are Linux-specific solutions, I'd have to research other platforms more to get a sense of the options there.

We also may just want to bring the sysmon wakeup back, perhaps with slight overrun allowed to avoid excessive M wakeups.

[ianlancetaylor]

I guess that wakeNetPoller doesn't help, because there is no poller sleeping at the point of calling time.Sleep.

Perhaps when netpoll sees a delay that is shorter than the poller resolution it should just do a non-blocking poll. That will effectively turn findrunnable into a busy wait when the next timer is very soon.

[ChrisHines]

While working on CL232298 I definitely observed anecdotal evidence that the netpoller has more latency than other ways of sleeping. From #38860 (comment):

My anecdotal observation here is that it appears the Linux netpoller implementation has more latency when waking after a timeout than the Go 1.13 timerproc implementation. Most of these benchmark numbers replicate on my Mac laptop, but the darwin netpoller seems to suffer less of that particular latency by comparison, and is also worse in other ways. So it may not be possible to close the gap with Go 1.13 purely in the scheduler code. Relying on the netpoller for timers changes the behavior as well, but these new numbers are at least in the same order of magnitude as Go 1.13.

I didn't try to address that in CL232298 primarily because it was already risky enough that I didn't want to make bigger changes. But an idea for something to try occurred to me back then. Maybe we could improve the latency of non-network timers by having one M block on a notesleep call instead of the netpoller. That would require findrunnable to compute two wakeup times, one for net timers to pass to the netpoller and one for all other timers to use with notesleep depending on which role it takes on (if any) when it cannot find any other work.

I haven't fully gauged how messy that would get.

Questions and concerns:

• Coordinating two sleeping M's probably has complicating edge cases to figure out.
• I haven't tested the latency of notesleep wakeups to know if it would actually help.
• Would it require duplicating all the timer fields on each P, one for net timers and one for the others?

One other oddity that I noticed when testing CL232298: The linux netpoller sometimes wakes up from the timeout value early by a several microseconds. When that happens findrunnable usually does not find any expired timers since they haven't actually expired yet. A new--very short--pollUntil value gets computed and the M reenters the netpoller. The subsequent wakeup is then typically rather late, maybe up to 1ms, but I am going from memory here. I might be able to dig up some trace logs showing this behavior if I still have them and people are interested.

[prattmic]

I guess that wakeNetPoller doesn't help, because there is no poller sleeping at the point of calling time.Sleep.

wakeNetPoller shouldn't matter either way, because even if we wake the netpoller, it will just sleep again with a new timeout of 1ms, which is too long. (Unless wakeNetPoller happens to take so long that the timer has expired by the time the woken M gets to checkTimers).

Perhaps when netpoll sees a delay that is shorter than the poller resolution it should just do a non-blocking poll. That will effectively turn findrunnable into a busy wait when the next timer is very soon.

Maybe we could improve the latency of non-network timers by having one M block on a notesleep call instead of the netpoller.

As somewhat of a combination of these, one potential option would be to make netpoll with a short timeout do non-blocking netpoll, short notetsleep, non-blocking netpoll. Though this has the disadvantage of slightly increasing latency of network events from netpoll.

One other oddity that I noticed when testing CL232298: The linux netpoller sometimes wakes up from the timeout value early by a several microseconds. When that happens findrunnable usually does not find any expired timers since they haven't actually expired yet. A new--very short--pollUntil value gets computed and the M reenters the netpoller. The subsequent wakeup is then typically rather late, maybe up to 1ms, but I am going from memory here. I might be able to dig up some trace logs showing this behavior if I still have them and people are interested.

Hm, this sounds like another bug, or perhaps a spurious netpollBreak from another M.

[prattmic]

It seems that on Windows, notetsleep has 1ms precision in addition to netpoll, so the explanation in #44343 (comment) doesn't explain the increase in latency on Windows.

[ChrisHines]

My first thought on the Windows behavior is that somehow osRelax is being mismanaged and allowing the timer resolution to decrease to its resting mode. That thought is driven by the spike on the above histograms at 15ms. I haven't thought through how that might happen now.

[ChrisHines]

Hm, this sounds like another bug, or perhaps a spurious netpollBreak from another M.

That could be, but I was logging at least some of the calls to netpollBreak as well and don't recall seeing seeing that happen. I saved my logging code in case it can help. https://github.com/ChrisHines/go/tree/dlog-backup

[vellotis]

For reference, output on my Windows 10:

> go1.16 run .
  avg 1.06ms;  min 475µs;  p50 1.01ms;  max 1.99ms;
  p90 1.13ms;  p99 1.99ms;  p999 1.99ms;  p9999 1.99ms;
      475µs [  1] ▌
      600µs [  1] ▌
      800µs [ 36] ██████████████████████████
        1ms [ 55] ████████████████████████████████████████
      1.2ms [  0]
      1.4ms [  0]
      1.6ms [  0]
      1.8ms [  7] █████
        2ms [  0]
      2.2ms [  0]

A totally different results from the #44343 (comment).

go env Output

$ go env
set GO111MODULE=on
set GOARCH=amd64
set GOBIN=
set GOCACHE=C:\Users\user\AppData\Local\go-build
set GOENV=C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\go\env
set GOEXE=.exe
set GOFLAGS=
set GOHOSTARCH=amd64
set GOHOSTOS=windows
set GOINSECURE=
set GOMODCACHE=C:\Projects\Go\pkg\mod
set GONOPROXY=
set GONOSUMDB=
set GOOS=windows
set GOPATH=C:\Projects\Go
set GOPRIVATE=
set GOPROXY=
set GOROOT=C:\Tools\Go\go1.16
set GOSUMDB=sum.golang.org
set GOTMPDIR=
set GOTOOLDIR=C:\Tools\Go\go1.16\pkg\tool\windows_amd64
set GOVCS=
set GOVERSION=go1.16
set GCCGO=gccgo
set AR=ar
set CC=gcc
set CXX=g++
set CGO_ENABLED=1
set GOMOD=NUL
set CGO_CFLAGS=-g -O2
set CGO_CPPFLAGS=
set CGO_CXXFLAGS=-g -O2
set CGO_FFLAGS=-g -O2
set CGO_LDFLAGS=-g -O2
set PKG_CONFIG=pkg-config
set GOGCCFLAGS=-m64 -mthreads -fno-caret-diagnostics -Qunused-arguments -fmessage-length=0 -fdebug-prefix-map=C:\Users\user\AppData\Local\Temp\go-build2862485594=/tmp/go-build -gno-record-gcc-switches

[egonelbre]

@vellotis this could be because there's something running in the background changing Windows timer resolution. This could be some other Go service/binary built using older Go version. Of course there can plenty of other programs that may change it.

You can use https://github.com/tebjan/TimerTool to see what the current value is. There's some more detail in https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/windows-timer-resolution-megawatts-wasted.

[zobkiw]

For what it's worth, go1.16.2 darwin/amd64 is also exhibiting this. In a program I'm running, the line time.Sleep(1 * time.Hour) takes roughly an hour and 3 minutes each time.

[prattmic]

@zobkiw It sounds like they is more likely to be related to #44868. I'm also curious if the failure is consistent and it really is always 1hr 3min, not 1hr 2min (or rather, ranging from 2-4min since alignment with 2min forcegc will vary)?

[zobkiw]

@prattmic Strangely, I just checked the output of the script now and (although I just restarted it a few hours before) it was spot on at one hour twice in a row. However, yesterday it was "generally" 3 minutes. I don't have an exact time since we were only seeing the minute logged. It was always 3 minutes (rounded) from the previous run. 1:00pm, 2:03pm, 3:06pm, 4:09pm, etc.

Some things to note about this loop I'm running, it is calling a shell script using exec.Command before sleeping for an hour, then it does it again. The script takes about 10 seconds to execute and completes its job. It is also running in a screen session but so was the one this morning that was doing fine so I don't think that was it. The machine it was running on, a mac mini, was basically idle other that this lightweight job.

If you have some code you would like me to run I would be happy to - otherwise I will keep an eye on it here as well and report anything else I see. Hopefully some of this is helpful in narrowing down the cause if you haven't already.

UPDATE 3-20-2021 10am ET: I just ran my program for about the last 24 hours and sure enough, it would run fine for the first few iterations and then start to sleep longer based on the logging. Mostly it would hover between 3-5 minutes late but once it was 9 minutes! I've (this morning) written another program using the same logic but with simulated activity (since the actual tasks did not seem to be part of the problem) and much more detailed logging. I have it running now in 3 environments, two using screen and one not. It is running on an M1 Big Sur 11.2.3 and an Intel mac mini running the same. One thing that struck me this morning was wondering if the machine being asleep at all caused the delay. Since it runs OK for awhile (while I was using the machine presumably) and then had the delays over night. This morning, the latest reading (while I was using the machine again to install the new test code) was back to 1 hour spot on - no delay. Once I get some more data at the end of the day or tomorrow morning I will report back and share the code if there remains a problem.

[tandr]

3 minutes per hour is rather worrisome, especially if some cron-like functionality required in a long-running service...

[networkimprov]

In case it's related; on Windows, timers tick while the system is in standby/suspend, but they pause on other platforms.

This is supposed to have been addressed already #36141

[zobkiw]

@prattmic et al, I took the liberty of writing a testbed to experiment with this issue. See all the details of test runs on Linux, Intel, and M1, along with source code here:

https://github.com/zobkiw/sleeptest

Comments welcome - especially if you find a bug in the code. Also, see the results directory for the output of the tests. Regardless, these results seem strange to me. I look forward to other input on this issue.

[networkimprov]

cc @zx2c4 :-)

[egonelbre]

@zobkiw could it be something due to cpu frequency scaling? Can you try locking the cpu to a specific frequency (something low) and see whether the problem disappears?

[woidl]

Dear Contributors,
we have the accuracy-problem on different Windows 10 versions (in current test: version19043.1415) after GO version 1.15.
hrtimedemo shows avg 1ms on 1.15.15, but avg 13.8 ms on 1.17.6.

This is very bad, since we use sleep and ticker funcs for period hardware measuring. I think thouse funcs should always stay in region of 1ms accuracy, otherwise not usable anymore - timer funcs are very important.
Isn't it possible to use the old (good) working fragments in 1.15.xx ?

Many thanks for your great work!

go version go1.15.15 windows/amd64
hrtimeDemo.exe
avg 1.01ms; min 77.1µs; p50 1ms; max 2.02ms;
p90 1.19ms; p99 2.02ms; p999 2.02ms; p9999 2.02ms;
77.1µs [ 2] █▌
200µs [ 0]
400µs [ 1] ▌
600µs [ 5] ████
800µs [ 34] ███████████████████████████
1ms [ 50] ████████████████████████████████████████
1.2ms [ 5] ████
1.4ms [ 0]
1.6ms [ 1] ▌
1.8ms+[ 2] █▌

go version go1.17.6 windows/amd64
hrtimeDemo.exe
avg 13.8ms; min 16.1µs; p50 15.4ms; max 16.8ms;
p90 16ms; p99 16.8ms; p999 16.8ms; p9999 16.8ms;
16.1µs [ 11] █████▌
2ms [ 0]
4ms [ 0]
6ms [ 0]
8ms [ 0]
10ms [ 0]
12ms [ 0]
14ms [ 76] ████████████████████████████████████████
16ms [ 13] ██████▌
18ms [ 0]

[gmalouf]

I want to pile in saying we are also experiencing this issue, causing us to rollback to Go 1.15 for our project (performance-sensitivity, degradation not worth any other benefits right now). This has been proven present on Linux-based distributions, so it would be great if the tagging reflected that (or removed the Windows-specific one) to help with prioritization.

[tsachiherman]

I wish there was a voting for this ticket, as I would have given it a +10 ( just like @jhnlsn). The current labeling of this issue, in my view, as a Windows-specific issue is misleading.

If I read what's being written here correctly, then go 1.16 introduces several independent regressions within it's event triggering subsystem :
The first issue, is the higher CPU pressure on a CPU-intensive application; in particular, those that involve a high number of context switching and blocking operations.
This issue would affect all range of solutions across the board, and would break CPU utilization linearly ( i.e., x2 CPU won't translate into x2 work due to the newly introduced overhead ).

Second, on Linux-based systems, the entire time-based event system ( which includes time.Sleep, but also time.After and time.Timer ), was downgraded to have millisecond level accuracy.
This regression on its own could have been tolerated if "it was always like that". Unfortunately, it puts into question any previously deployed platform that would be using these calls, as these platforms would need to be re-evaluated and tested with these regressions in mind before they could be upgraded to 1.16 ( or above ).

Third, on Windows, the regression ( which I have not verified myself, and I'll refer to @woidl's excellent post to speak for itself ) is making the usage of these calls absurdly hard to justify.
A timing precision of 15ms was acceptable 25 years ago, when writing windows programs that were waiting for WM_TIMER messages. Nowadays, windows have evolved considerably and there is no justification for having this slow mechanism ( ** maybe with the exception of a UI related activity )

I do realize the fixing these issues might not be trivial; especially as @prattmic noted with his Linux v5.11 solution. Could I suggest that beside prioritizing this issue, the documentation itself would be updated to reflect the above ?
As is, the usage of these functionalities might be reasonable for coarse resolution timers, but unsuitable for high precision timer ( as was previously supported in 1.15 ). Documenting this would reduce the false expectation of these methods.

Do you agree with my conclusion above @mknyszek @ChrisHines ?

[prattmic]

With regards to fixes, I've thought about this more today and my thoughts are:

• For Linux, we should use epoll_pwait2, like https://go.dev/cl/363417. This system call is on the newer side, but this will improve things going forward and provide a workaround (upgrade the kernel) for particularly affected users.
• For Windows, I think we can do something like @jstarks' (2) in runtime: time.Sleep takes more time than expected #44343 (comment). We already have a per-thread high resolution timer, so netpoll would do:
  • SetWaitableTimer, to set the timeout.
  • WaitForMultipleObjects to wait for IO or timeout.
  • GetQueuedCompletionStatusEx, nonblocking, if the prior call indicated IO readiness.
  • This seems fairly straightforward, the main concern is how much more expensive is making these two extra calls?

cc @aclements

[aclements]

This seems fairly straightforward, the main concern is how much more expensive is making these two extra calls?

If we're willing to assume that long timers require less precision, we could somewhat reduce this cost by only using the high-resolution timer if the timeout is short, and otherwise using the low-precision timeout to the blocking GetQueuedCompletionStatusEx.

We could go even further and record the precision when a timer is enqueued, so we know at creation-time how precise we have to be once it bubbles to the top of the heap. However, this is complicated because the top timer might be a low-precision timer firing soon, immediately followed by a high-precision timer and we actually need a high-precision wait to avoid missing the second timer.

[CannibalVox]

If we're willing to assume that long timers require less precision, we could somewhat reduce this cost by only using the high-resolution timer if the timeout is short, and otherwise using the low-precision timeout to the blocking GetQueuedCompletionStatusEx.

We could go even further and record the precision when a timer is enqueued, so we know at creation-time how precise we have to be once it bubbles to the top of the heap. However, this is complicated because the top timer might be a low-precision timer firing soon, immediately followed by a high-precision timer and we actually need a high-precision wait to avoid missing the second timer.

Would this involve returning to 1ms precision on the regular timer? There are probably many cases where +/- 8ms are acceptable, but I doubt they account for the majority of sleeps in any given go program.

[woidl]

Hi, I continue with my opinion that 1ms resolution is needed.
Hope you can solve the issue (still approx 14ms resolution on Windows 10/11 with go1.17.8 windows/amd64) in near future.
Thank you all for doing a great job!

[aclements]

Would this involve returning to 1ms precision on the regular timer? There are probably many cases where +/- 8ms are acceptable, but I doubt they account for the majority of sleeps in any given go program.

I'm not sure what you mean by a "regular" timer. If it's a short sleep or timeout, we would use a slightly more CPU-expensive way to wait that has higher precision. Hopefully we can do that without timeBeginPeriod.

I suspect it's actually quite common for programs to have long timers. RPC-driven programs often have a large number of long-duration timers for timeouts (often on the order of minutes). They also often go idle, which would enter a blocking netpoll the same way a sleep does.

[CannibalVox]

I'm not sure what you mean by a "regular" timer. If it's a short sleep or timeout, we would use a slightly more CPU-expensive way to wait that has higher precision. Hopefully we can do that without timeBeginPeriod.

I suspect it's actually quite common for programs to have long timers. RPC-driven programs often have a large number of long-duration timers for timeouts (often on the order of minutes). They also often go idle, which would enter a blocking netpoll the same way a sleep does.

I see, you're right. The main concern I have, then, is that semaphores (and therefore notesleep/notewake) are still based on the system timer granularity. I understand that this is the "slow" path, but there's a difference between 1ms futex and a 16ms (when unmodified) singleobjectwait.

[ianlancetaylor]

Moving to 1.20 milestone.

[jensfredgaard]

Greetings! I am curious, what exactly got moved to the 1.20 milestone? Is the goal to get back to the 1-2ms from 1/64s, adding a high resolution timer or something entirely different?

I am currently working on a project where we are targeting the VSYNC time without using VSYNC, essentially using VSYNC without double buffering. The current solution works, but comes with a hefty performance cost. A solution that is 20 times more expensive than current Go timers, would still beat our solution by magnitudes! We have another workaround in the pipeline, but we are curious to see if you will provide us with a better alternative.

I have been following a lot of the issues related to time on Windows and every single time it comes back to the 1/64s update interval, a year passes and the issue is frozen.

On a time related note, it would be lovely to have a time function that calls Windows Performance Counters. Which I am guessing you are already using to measure benchmarks. .dll files are not exactly user friendly or beginner friendly for that matter :)

It is an absolute pleasure programming in Go, keep up the good work!

[march1993]

Calling timeBeginPeriod function seems to solve problem for me.

var (
	winmmDLL            = syscall.NewLazyDLL("winmm.dll")
	procTimeBeginPeriod = winmmDLL.NewProc("timeBeginPeriod")
)

func init() {
	procTimeBeginPeriod.Call(uintptr(1))
}

[itamadev]

Hey @march1993, could you maybe provide some more details about your solution? maybe your go version and your windows version that you tested that code?

I tried reproducing your fix and didn't see any change in behavior,
providing some benchmarking would be nice too.

[CannibalVox]

"solve the problem" is rather vague given the many-faceted nature of this issue, but I was able to return sleep granularity on windows 10 to 1ms with the following code (which roughly matches march1993):

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"syscall"
	"time"
)

var (
	winmmDLL            = syscall.NewLazyDLL("winmm.dll")
	procTimeBeginPeriod = winmmDLL.NewProc("timeBeginPeriod")
)

func main() {
	procTimeBeginPeriod.Call(uintptr(1))

	for i := 0; i < 10; i++ {
		time.Sleep(time.Nanosecond)
		fmt.Println(time.Now())
	}
}

For those who were satisfied with 1ms and were upset to find the windows granularity reduced to 16ms, this will satisfy, although I don't understand the os_windows.go code very well, and I'm worried that some circumstances may return the granularity to 16ms while the program is in-flight.

For those of us who concerned about the occasional reduction in darwin/linux timer granularity, this will obviously do nothing. For those of us who were hoping to see the improvements discussed above used to bring the windows timer granularity up to that of darwin/linux, this also does not help.