How long is a .NET DateTime/TimeSpan tick?

Question

How long is a .NET DateTime/TimeSpan tick?

Fibrosis

Answer 1

The tick is the unit of granularity for the .NET DateTime and TimeSpan value types.

It has the following common conversions:

1 tick = 100 nanoseconds
       = 0.1 microseconds
       = 0.0001 milliseconds
       = 0.0000001 seconds

Fibrosis

You answered your own question one minute after posting it? – Comradery

uh, StackOverflow encourages this sort of thing in the FAQ, dont down vote him for that. see: #19057 – Cobb

Answer 2

Although currently a tick is 100 nanoseconds, it is best not to rely on this as an absolute. Rather, use 'TimeSpan.TicksPerSecond' (or any of the other TicksPerXxx member values)

Melantha

This is true. Don't hard code these in your code. However, they are absolute and will not be changed by Microsoft. The reason for this post is that sometimes one needs to do this math on a calculator and I wanted to make this chart available. – Fibrosis

Example creating a 10 second timespan: new TimeSpan(TimeSpan.TicksPerSecond * 10) – Monogenesis

Answer 3

To quote MSDN:

The smallest unit of time is the tick, which is equal to 100 nanoseconds.

Metrology fail.

Sundried

Answer 4

Note that, although the theoretical resolution of DateTime.Now is quite high, the resolution - ie how often it is updated - it quite a bit lower.

Apparently, on modern systems, DateTime.Now has a resolution of 10 milliseconds... See msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.datetime.now.aspx

Heartbreaker