Is it suitable to use usleep as Timer in c

Question

I am doing C program in Linux . I have a main thread which continuously updates values of two variables and other thread write those variable values into a file every 20 milliseconds. I have used usleep to achieve this time interval. sample code is below.

 main()
{
 .
 .
 .
 .
 .

 pthread_create(...write_file..);   /* started another thread by passing   a  function write_file */
 while(variable1) 
  {
    updates value of variables 

  }

return 0;
}


void write_file()

{
 .
 .
 .
 .
 fp = fopen("sample.txt" , "a");

 while(variable2)
 {

   fprintf(fp," %d \n", somevariable);

   usleep(20 * 1000);

 }

 fclose(fp);
}

Is it suitable to use usleep function achieve 20 milliseconds time interval or should I use some other methods like Timer.? Is this usleep is accurate enough ? Does this sleep function any way affect the main thread ?

Answer 1

Using of sleep() family often results in non-precise timing, especially when process has many CPU-consuming threads and required intervals are relatively small, like 20ms. So you shouldn't assume that *sleep() call blocks execution exactly to specified time. For described above situation actual sleep duration may be even twice or more greater than specified (assuming that kernel is not real-time one). As result you should implement some kind of compensation logic, that adjusts sleep duration for subsequent calls.

More precise (but of course not ideal) approach is to use POSIX timers. See timer_create(). The most precise timers are the ones that use SIGEV_SIGNAL or SIGEV_THREAD_ID notifications (latter is only on Linux systems). As signal number you can use one of the real-time signals (SIGRTMIN to SIGRTMAX), but be aware that pthread implementations often use few of these signals internally, so you should choose actual number carefully. And also doing something in signal handler context requires extra attention, because not every library function may be used safely here. You can find safe list here.

P.S. Also note that select() called with empty sets is a fairly portable way to sleep with subsecond precision.