What is the unit of gettimeofday()?

Question

I've a program to calculate the latency of an object in a pub-sub model. I've used the following function for timestamp:

uint64_t GetTimeStamp() {
    struct timeval tv;
    gettimeofday(&tv,NULL);
    return tv.tv_sec*(uint64_t)1000000+tv.tv_usec;
}

The latency is measured as timestamp difference in publisher and subscriber. So, I'm concerned about the unit of the latency measured. Is it in seconds or microseconds??

Answer 1

The timeval structure has tv_sec, which gives you the absolute value for the seconds, and tv_usec, which gives you the remaining fraction in micro seconds.

So, you could get the resolution in micro seconds.

For more information, http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Elapsed-Time.html