Re: Repeated timeouts period

[Ben Johnson <ben blarg net>]

On Thu, Oct 13, 2005 at 09:14:41PM +0200, Nicolas George wrote:
...
> What I want, is that the n-th change will be almost exactly n seconds avter
> the time origin.

this is fairly easy for the application programmer to accomplish without
further help from the api.  on the other hand, adding further help to
the api would likely be difficult and may not fix the problem...  or,
that is, it may just cause more confusion because it probably wouldn't
solve this common problem in a way programmers expect.

For the application programmer to deal with this problem, all s/he must
do is *not* use the automatic timer restart facility, but instead create
a new timeout event with the interval adjusted to handle the drift.  Use
system calls to get the wall-clock time, store a permanent copy, and use
that copy to adjust future intervals by whatever amount necessary

- Ben