[Python-Dev] PEP 564: Add new time functions with nanosecond resolution (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Mon Oct 16 11:58:03 EDT 2017

On Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 8:37 AM, Ben Hoyt <benhoyt at gmail.com> wrote:

I've read the examples you wrote here, but I'm struggling to see what the real-life use cases are for this. When would you care about both very long-running servers (104 days+) and nanosecond precision? I'm not saying it could never happen, but would want to see real "experience reports" of when this is needed.

A long-running server might still want to log precise durations of various events. (Durations of events are the bread and butter of server performance tuning.) And for this it might want to use the most precise clock available, which is perf_counter(). But if perf_counter()'s epoch is the start of the process, after 104 days it can no longer report ns precision due to float rounding (even though the internal counter does not lose ns).

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