Function TscTimePoint.hardNow

There are two variants of this method. "now" and "hardNow". By default, they do exactly the same thing: report the time right now, as reported by the cycles counter in the CPU.

As fetching the cycles counter may be relatively expensive, threads that do a lot of time keeping may find that getting the hardware counter each and every time is too costly. In that case, you can call "setHardNowThreshold" with a threshold. Calling, e.g. setHardNow(3) will mean that now will call hardNow every third invocation.

Even when now doesn't call hardNow, it is still guaranteed to montoniously advance, but it not guaranteed to be accurate.

A good rule of thumb is this: If you use requires getting the time on a semi-regular basis, call now whenever precise time is not required. If your use requires time only sporadically, only use hardNow.

Warning

now does not guarantee monotonity across different threads. If you need different threads to have comparable times, use hardNow.