Hi, I'm having a slight problem with uptime...

I'm running two servers, one running Slackware Linux 9 and the other running Windows 2000 server. During some maintenance both servers were shutdown. When power was back I started up the two machines at roughly the same time.
I have a couple of php scripts on each machine which report the uptime. The Windows uptime is a result of calling GetTickCount() from the Windows API. The Linux uptime is a result of parsing /proc/uptime.

Initially, after both machines had booted, the difference in uptimes between the two machines was around 6 seconds. Somehow this difference has slowly been drifting. Now after 3 days(ish) the difference is now about 23 seconds. Obviously there is something wrong here and I'm going to attempt to find out what it is.

Anyway, back to the main question. Is there a function call I can make in c under Linux which is the equivalent of the Windows GetTickCount() function? I've read that /proc/uptime sometimes reports the wrong uptime and so I'd like to check if it is the cause of the problem.

Thanks in advance.

clock() returns a clock_t value (usually unsigned long) that is the number of
CLOCKS_PER_SEC or CLK_TCK per second.

Note -- this value rolls over on 32 bit systems after a while, so you need to do something to keep track of the number of times the value rolls over.

Plus, if uptime is wrong, you may have internal clock problems. A lot of systems have to have a daemon running to correct time constantly or have used date to correct time periodically. There are other methods to alter the clock as well.

Thanks, I'll take a look at clock().

On the Linux machine I've got ntpd running which should be keeping the clock correct and I have a program synchronising the Windows machine's clock every 24 hours. Thinking about it, the Windows machine might be the cause of the problem if the clock is deviating too much in the 24 hours between synchronisation.