Using timers
Timing is a very important aspect of software systems in general and distributed applications in particular. Therefore a hardware timer—a device used to measure time intervals—is essential component of any computer and all modern operating systems provide interface allowing applications to use it.
There are two typical use cases related to the timer. The first one assumes that the application wants to know the current time and asks the operating system to find it out. The second use case is when the application asks the operating system to notify it (usually, by means of invoking a callback) when a certain amount of time elapses.
The second use case is particularly important when it comes to developing distributed applications with Boost.Asio because a timer is the only way to implement the timeout mechanism for asynchronous operations.
The Boost.Asio library includes several classes that implement timers, which we will consider in this recipe.
How to do it…
The Boost.Asio library...
