How to sleep a C++ Boost Thread

Question

Seems impossible to sleep a thread using boost::thread. Method sleep requires a system_time but how can I build it?

Looking inside libraries doesn't really help much...

Basically I have a thread inside the function that I pass to this thread as entry point, I would like to call something like

 boost::this_thread::sleep

or something, how to do this?

Thank you

Solution 1

Depending on your version of Boost:

Either...

#include <boost/chrono.hpp>
#include <boost/thread/thread.hpp> 

boost::this_thread::sleep_for(boost::chrono::milliseconds(100));

Or...

#include <boost/date_time/posix_time/posix_time.hpp>
#include <boost/thread/thread.hpp> 

boost::this_thread::sleep(boost::posix_time::milliseconds(100));

You can also use microseconds, seconds, minutes, hours and maybe some others, I'm not sure.

Solution 2

From another post, I learned boost::this_thread::sleep is deprecated for Boost v1.5.3: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_53_0/doc/html/thread/thread_management.html

Instead, try

void sleep_for(const chrono::duration<Rep, Period>& rel_time);

e.g.

boost::this_thread::sleep_for(boost::chrono::seconds(60));

Or maybe try

void sleep_until(const chrono::time_point<Clock, Duration>& abs_time);

I was using Boost v1.53 with the deprecated sleep function, and it aperiodically crashed the program. When I changed calls to the sleep function to calls to the sleep_for function, the program stopped crashing.

Solution 3

firstly

boost::posix_time::seconds secTime(1);  
boost::this_thread::sleep(secTime); 

secondly

boost::this_thread::sleep(boost::posix_time::milliseconds(100));

Solution 4

I learned the hard way that at least in MS Visual Studio (tried 2013 and 2015) there is the huge difference between

boost::this_thread::sleep(boost::posix_time::microseconds(SmallIterval));

and

boost::this_thread::sleep_for(boost::chrono::microseconds(SmallIterval));
or
std::this_thread::sleep_for(std::chrono::microseconds(SmallIterval));

when interval is smaller than some rather substantial threshold (I saw threshold of 15000 microseconds = 15 milliseconds).

If SmallIterval is small, sleep() does instantaneous interruption. sleep(100 mks) behaves as sleep(0 mks).

But sleep_for() for the time interval smaller than a threshold pauses for the entire threshold. sleep_for(100 mks) behaves as sleep_for(15000 mks).

Behavior for intervals larger than threshold and for value 0 is the same.

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Comments

[Admin]

Yes, thank you... I didn't pay attention using this_thread but just boost::thread and nothing worked:) Thansk

[Tim MB]

This gives me the following error (using Xcode 5 / LLVM): error: no viable conversion from 'boost::posix_time::microseconds' (aka 'subsecond_duration<boost::posix_time::time_duration, 1000000>') to 'const system_time' (aka 'const boost::posix_time::ptime')

[kgbook]

use boost::this_thread::sleep_for instead of boost::this_thread::sleep, the latter is deprecated, see boost::this_thread::sleep.