Trying to simulate constant byte rate. Confusion with time.sleep results

Question

Context

I\'m using windows 7 on my computer(the player) and linux(debian) on my college computer(the streamer), which I control using ssh.
I was trying to simu

Answer 1

Conclusion

Thanks to @J.F.Sebastian and his code, I came to learned that:

• Its better to use use a deadline as a time reference than create to a new reference each loop
• Using a deadline "amortizes" the imprecision of time.sleep, oscilating a bit around the desired bitrate but resulting in an correct(and much more constant) average.
• You only need to you use time.time() once, that means less calculations imprecisions.

As a result, I get a constant 32000 B/s some times oscilating to 31999 and very rarely to 31745
Now I can hear the music without any lag or jitter!

I tried using @J.F.Sebastian implentation using only the % operator to sleep the remainder, but the KB/s oscilate strangelly, so I decided to keep the deadline implementation, which suffers imprecision by keeping adding a float value. Nevertheless, the overall result is enough for my needs.
Thank you everyone.

Final Code

def read(self):
    self.deadline += 0.020  
    delay = self.deadline - time.perf_counter()
    if delay > 0:
        time.sleep(delay)
    return self._read()

Answer 2

As you can read in the question you linked, there are no guarantees for sleep and it can vary widely depending on the OS. But 4 ms resolution seems sufficient if you want to send data every 20 ms. There should be no need to improve your sleep() accuracy.

On Debian, at around 0.02 seconds input, your computer sleeps around 12 / 10 of the time you ask it to. 10 / 12 * 32 is 26.6, so it makes sense if you only receive 27 KB/s.

Instead of sleeping 0.02 seconds, use an adaptive sleeping time. Measure how long the last iteration took (sleeping + sending the data), and shorten your sleeping time to make the whole iteration take 0.02 seconds.