High-Performance Timer vs StopWatch

Question

Does anyone know if the HiPerfTimer or the StopWatch class is better for benchmarking, and why?

Solution 1

Stopwatch is based on High resolution timer (where available), you can check that with IsHighResolution

Solution 2

They are the same when it comes to high resolution timing.

Both use this:

[DllImport("Kernel32.dll")]
private static extern bool QueryPerformanceCounter(out long PerformanceCount);

and this:

[DllImport("Kernel32.dll")]
private static extern bool QueryPerformanceFrequency(out long Frequency);

to do the underlying timing. (You can verify this with Reflector.NET). I'd use StopWatch because it's part of the framework already (no need to link another dll) and it had better features than HiPerfTimer.

Solution 3

StopWatch- it also works on systems that don't support a high resolution performance counter and you don't need any external libraries to use it.

The other one throws an Win32Exception if there is no support for a high resolution counter.