c# - Need microsecond delay in .NET app for throttling UDP multicast transmission rate

Question

I'm writing a UDP multicast client/server pair in C# and I need a delay on the order of 50-100 μsec (microseconds) to throttle the server transmission rate. This helps to avoid significant packet loss and also helps to keep from overloading the clients that are disk I/O bound. Please do not suggest Thread.Sleep or Thread.SpinWait. I would not ask if I needed either of those.

My first thought was to use some kind of a high-performance counter and do a simple while() loop checking the elapsed time but I'd like to avoid that as it feels kludgey. Wouldn't that also peg the CPU utilization for the server process?

Bonus points for a cross-platform solution, i.e. not Windows specific. Thanks in advance, guys!

Answer 1

Very short sleep times are generally best achieved by a CPU spin loop (like the kind you describe). You generally want to avoid using the high-precision timer calls as they can themselves take up time and skew the results. I wouldn't worry too much about CPU pegging on the server for such short wait times.

I would encapsulate the behavior in a class, as follows:

• Create a class whose static constructor runs a spin loop for several million iterations and captures how long it takes. This gives you an idea of how long a single loop cycle would take on the underlying hardware.
• Compute a uS/iteration value that you can use to compute arbitrary sleep times.
• When asked to sleep for a particular period of time, divide uS to sleep by the uS/iteration value previously computed to identify how many loop iterations to perform.
• Spin using a while loop until the estimated time elapses.