Sending an audio packet every 20 milliseconds

Question

I have an application that needs to send an audio packet over UDP. To avoid jitter I want to schedule a thread or task to perform this task every 20 milliseconds. The pseudo code looks like this:

while(true) 
{
    byte[] packet = GetNextPacket();
    socket.Send(packet);
    var waitUntill = DateTime.Now.AddMilliseconds(20);
    while(DateTime.Now < waitUntill) { }
}

This works fine, but it uses 100% of a CPU core. Which is of course undesirable. I've tried playing with Thread.Sleep and Thread.Yield and their task equivalents but in all cases I either end up with 100% load or an extremely jittery experience (which is to be expected).

Is there no way in C# to schedule a task at such a fine grained level? I don't need a 100% guarantee (Windows is not a real-time OS) but something that will work most of the time. Note that I'm not worried about the GC :).

I'm fine with calling any COM code to achieve this, though my ideal solution would be multi-platform. I'm currently using dotnet core 3.0.

If it is not possible in C#, how is it achieved in languages like C++ which do perform these kinds of tasks.

Answer 1

Look into using a multimedia timer:

High resolution timer in C#

They're specifically designed for these kind of high-resolution applications.