How frequent is DateTime.Now updated ? or is there

Question

I have code running in a loop and it's saving state based on the current time. Sometimes this can be just milliseconds apart, but for some reason it seems that DateTime.Now will always return values of at least 10 ms apart even if it's only 2 or 3 ms later. This presents a major problem since the state i'm saving depends on the time it was saved (e.g. recording something)

My test code that returns each value 10 ms apart:

public static void Main()
{
    var dt1 = DateTime.Now;
    System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(2);
    var dt2 = DateTime.Now;

    // On my machine the values will be at least 10 ms apart
    Console.WriteLine("First: {0}, Second: {1}", dt1.Millisecond, dt2.Millisecond);
}

Is there another solution on how to get the accurate current time up to the millisecond ?

Someone suggested to look at the Stopwatch class. Although the Stopwatch class is very accurate it does not tell me the current time, something i need in order to save the state of my program.

Answer 1

You could use DateTime.Now.Ticks, read the artical on MSDN

"A single tick represents one hundred nanoseconds or one ten-millionth of a second."