• OK. I did more testing and more investigating and would like to clarify to all what is going on.

    First of all the 15 or so ms gaps are not a result of the CPU attending to other tasks. The task switching is much faster then this interval. I run some tests and with multiple threads storing the data the records are intermixed between sources but the time gap remains.

    The issue is the Windows system timer. It is being updated 64 times per second and this generates the 15.6 (or so) ms intervals. I read somewhere that sometimes this can be changed by some processes but did not find the time to dive into this yet. Some other sources claim that on some systems the timer is updated every 10 ms.

    So my instinct that this is the getdate() function's internal workings that generate the gaps was correct. Since it uses the system clock and the system clock is quite primitive we can not expect to get the 3 or so accuracy the DATETIME data type supports because of the limitation of the system timer.

    I run my tests on my WinXP box. I did not have a chance to run it on a Win 2003 server so I don't know if it works the same way or not.

    So Steve , if you want another question of the day you may explore this issue. 🙂

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