How accurate is python's time.sleep()?

Question

I can give it floating point numbers, such as

time.sleep(0.5)

but how accurate is it? If i give it

time.sleep(0.05)
         


        

Answer 1

You can't really guarantee anything about sleep(), except that it will at least make a best effort to sleep as long as you told it (signals can kill your sleep before the time is up, and lots more things can make it run long).

For sure the minimum you can get on a standard desktop operating system is going to be around 16ms (timer granularity plus time to context switch), but chances are that the % deviation from the provided argument is going to be significant when you're trying to sleep for 10s of milliseconds.

Signals, other threads holding the GIL, kernel scheduling fun, processor speed stepping, etc. can all play havoc with the duration your thread/process actually sleeps.