How accurate is python's time.sleep()?

Question

I can give it floating point numbers, such as

time.sleep(0.5)

but how accurate is it? If i give it

time.sleep(0.05)
         


        

Answer 1

Why don't you find out:

from datetime import datetime
import time

def check_sleep(amount):
    start = datetime.now()
    time.sleep(amount)
    end = datetime.now()
    delta = end-start
    return delta.seconds + delta.microseconds/1000000.

error = sum(abs(check_sleep(0.050)-0.050) for i in xrange(100))*10
print "Average error is %0.2fms" % error

For the record, I get around 0.1ms error on my HTPC and 2ms on my laptop, both linux machines.