Hello, I experimented something very strange, a few days ago. I was debugging an application at a customer's site, and the problem turned out to be that time.clock() was going "backwards", that is it was sometimes (randomically) returning a floating point value which was "less than" the value returned by the previous invokation. The computer was a pretty fast one (P4 3Ghz I think, running Windows XP), and this happened only between very close invokations of time.clock().
I have triple-verified this, including printing the repr() of the floating point number and verifying it was really minor than the previous value by a few microseconds. In other words, I'm absolutely positive that it's not a mistake on my side, but that time.clock() was really apparently "jumping backward". This was confusing the hell out of my application, of course, and I just hacked it so to ignore these bogus reads, and just reading off again. Since the error was just of a few microseconds, reading time.clock() again produces a number which was higher than what I had before, and thus OK for my application. I was wondering if someone had experimented this behaviour before. I tried googling but to no effect. Is it possible this to be a bug in Python itself (maybe, shooting at the moon, in the conversion between the 64bit performance counter and the floating point representation returned by time.clock()), or could it be a bug in Windows itself or the mother board drivers (buf if so, wouldn't other application start going mad)? -- Giovanni Bajo -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
