Will a thread sleep if told to sleep for zero seconds?

Question

My question is simple. If I use std::this_thread::sleep_for(0ms), will the thread sleep at all?

I know this seems like a silly question, but when I tell a thread to sleep for a very small amount (such as 10 microseconds), it often sleeps for at least 5-10 milliseconds. I know this is related to how operating systems schedule their processes. I just want to know how all of the corner cases work, as I have some code that may be slowing down due to sleeping for small, zero, or negative amounts of time.

EDIT 1: I have simplified the question to just be about sleeping for zero seconds.

EDIT 2: Many comments so far has been about how I shouldn't try to do this, but I both have a reason and I'm curious. In my code, I am not literally calling std::this_thread::sleep_for(0ms), but instead, I am sleeping for a variable amount of time based on external conditions. When I compute the amount of time I need to sleep, the result can be positive, negative, or zero. I want to know if I am still sleeping for results less than or equal to zero.

Answer 1

The most common behavior that I've observed on typical platforms is that it acts like a voluntary yield operation. That is, it will do nothing unless there is another ready-to-run thread that is not currently scheduled, in which case it will yield to that thread.

There are no specific requirements on how the platform handles this case. Treating as a no-op would be perfectly reasonable. Treating it as the shortest sleep the platform could support would also be perfectly reasonable.