Windows timer_create

When a timer is signaled, the processor must run to process the associated instructions. High-frequency periodic timers keep the processor continually busy, which prevents the system from remaining in a lower power state for any meaningful amount of time.

This can have a negative impact on portable computer battery life and scenarios that depend on effective power management, such as large datacenters.

For greater energy efficiency, consider using event-based notifications instead of time-based notifications in your application. If a timer is necessary, use a timer that is signaled once rather than a periodic timer, or set the interval to a value greater than one second.

The creating thread specifies whether the timer is a manual-reset timer or a synchronization timer. The creating thread can specify a name for the timer object. Threads in other processes can open a handle to an existing timer by specifying its name in a call to the OpenWaitableTimer function.

Any thread with a handle to a timer object can use one of the wait functions to wait for the timer state to be set to signaled. A thread can use the CancelWaitableTimer function to set the timer to the inactive state. To reset the timer, call SetWaitableTimer.

Take a look at SetTimer function. You should look up the documentation for whichever programming environment it is that you are using to figure out how to do timers.

As you have not indicated what environment, it isn't possible to answer your question. A thread pool is a collection of worker threads that efficiently execute asynchronous callbacks on behalf of the application.

The thread pool is primarily used to reduce the number of application threads and provide management of the worker threads. CreateTimerQueueTimer Function. Creates a timer-queue timer. This timer expires at the specified due time, then after every specified period.

When the timer expires, the callback function is called. If you don't need to be doing anything else in your application, you can use the sleep function. It will stop execution from continuing, and then resume executing code after the specified duration has expired ish. In Windows, we used to use a multimedia timer function if you wanted to sleep for less than one-second intervals.

Some other methods are platform-dependent. Here's a Google Library for doing high resolution timing as well. It might help. For example, this would setup a timer that gets called every 45 seconds and displays a message box when it's called:. The second parameter is a number that you can use to uniquely identify the timer. You could have more than one timer running at a time and would need a way to tell which one fired. The third parameter is how long you want the timer to wait before it fires.

It is in milliseconds, so you have to multiple by a thousand if you want seconds. Otherwise, you can pass a pointer to a callback function that will be called instead.

Remember, the timer will keep firing every X milliseconds until you kill it. You can kill it by calling KillTimer and passing in the same number you passed to the second parameter when you called SetTimer. From Timers and default actions :. This browser is no longer supported. Download Microsoft Edge More info. Contents Exit focus mode. Please rate your experience Yes No.

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