calculating system clock resolution

[Peter Hansen]

Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> This brings me to an even simpler method of getting the resolution of
> time.time(), without the overhead of a while loop:
> 
>>>>abs(time.time() - time.time())
> 
> 1.0013580322265625e-05
> which is approximately 0.01ms, just as you expected.

This doesn't necessarily work, at least on Windows, where the 
time.time() resolution is much worse than the time it takes to execute a 
couple of calls to time.time().  Most of the time the values returned by 
two consecutive time.time() calls are identical, differing only if the 
timer just happens to tick between the two.  (On my machine a simple 
while loop that performs the above calculation until it produces a 
non-zero value has to run on average over 10000 times.)

-Peter