> How I am supposed to know that without asking > someone that already knows? A good idea is to ask the answerer how he/she figured it out. Usually when I

> How I am supposed to know that without asking > someone that already knows? A good idea is to ask the answerer how he/she figured it out. Usually when I run into compiler bugs, I look at the assembly output to make sure. I don't know why you were messing with RDTSC, but usually when I need a high resolution timer I use clock_gettime() or gettimeofday(). The former doesn't work on OSX, but the latter does, and mach_absolute_time() or clock_get_system_nanotime() seem to work on OSX if you really need them.