How to Capture Each New Millisecond Without Overwhelming the CPU

Question

My requirement here is that I need to update time in Milliseconds continuously, so with each new millisecond elapsed, I need to capture that and write it to a file. I tried to run that in a while loop but I noticed that the program took more than 50% of CPU. I tried to add the method Thread.Sleep(1) at the end of each cycle and that caused some of milliseconds being skipped. Example:

1698281344731

1698281344747

1698281344762

1698281344778

1698281344794

Here is my code, would appreciate any advice that could steer me to the right direction.

 while (true)
 {
     long CurrentMS = GetMilliseconds();
     Writer(CurrentMS);
     Console.Write(CurrentMS + "\r\n");
     Thread.Sleep(1);
 }

Answer 1

You could offload the writing to happen only after you are done looping, or every x iterations. That would let you avoid any slowdowns that may by caused by writing to disk. The easiest way to do that would be to store your strings in a list, and then write them all out at the end.