How accurate is System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch?

Question

How accurate is System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch? I am trying to do some metrics for different code paths and I need it to be exact. Should I be using stopwatch or is there another solution that is more accurate?

I have been told that sometimes stopwatch gives incorrect information.

Answer 1

Why don't you profile your code instead of focusing on microbenchmarks?

There are some good open source profilers, like:

• NProf
• Prof-It for C#
• NProfiler
• ProfileSharp