What is mach_absolute_time based on on iPhone

Solution 1:

Had some trouble with this myself. There isn't a lot of good documentation, so I went with experimentation. Here's what I was able to determine:

mach_absolute_time depends on the processor of the device. It returns ticks since the device was last rebooted (otherwise known as uptime). In order to get it in a human readable form, you have to modify it by the result from mach_timebase_info (a ratio), which will return billionth of seconds (or nanoseconds). To make this more usable I use a function like the one below:

#include <mach/mach_time.h>

int getUptimeInMilliseconds()
{
    const int64_t kOneMillion = 1000 * 1000;
    static mach_timebase_info_data_t s_timebase_info;

    static dispatch_once_t onceToken;
    dispatch_once(&onceToken, ^{
        (void) mach_timebase_info(&s_timebase_info);
    });

    // mach_absolute_time() returns billionth of seconds,
    // so divide by one million to get milliseconds
    return (int)((mach_absolute_time() * s_timebase_info.numer) / (kOneMillion * s_timebase_info.denom));
}

Solution 2:

If you don't care a lot about computation time you can use simple Obj-C class from Foundation

NSTimeInterval systemUptime = [[NSProcessInfo processInfo] systemUptime];

Solution 3:

In case someone needs it in Swift (works in 4.2 & 5.0).

let beginTime = mach_absolute_time()

// do something...

var baseInfo = mach_timebase_info_data_t(numer: 0, denom: 0)
if mach_timebase_info(&baseInfo) == KERN_SUCCESS {
    let finiTime = mach_absolute_time()
    
    let nano = (finiTime - beginTime) * UInt64(baseInfo.numer) / UInt64(baseInfo.denom)
}