How to use AverageTimer32 and AverageBase performance counters with System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch?

Question

When I execute the following program and look at the performance counter the results don\'t make sense to me. The average value is zero and the min/max values are ~0.4 when I w

Answer 1

This is an old thread, but I thought I'd chime in. I was told by someone from Microsoft that I shouldn't use TimeSpan, StopWatch, or DateTime when working with Performance Counters. Instead, he recommended adding the following native method to my project:

internal static class NativeMethods
{
    [DllImport("Kernel32.dll")]
    public static extern void QueryPerformanceCounter(ref long ticks); 
}

When incrementing a counter, he recommended doing so like this:

public void Foo()
{
    var beginTicks = 0L;

    var endTicks = 0L;

    NativeMethods.QueryPerformanceCounter(ref beginTicks);

    // Do stuff

    NativeMethods.QueryPerformanceCounter(ref endTicks);

    this.Counter.IncrementBy(endTicks - beginTicks);
    this.BaseCounter.Increment();
}