Is there a way to call time() with an increment smaller than seconds?

[BBQ]

For a long time I've used time() as a primary key on small databases just to keep track of records' ages. The problem is: what do I do if I have more than 1 transaction per second? Is there any perlfunc that will let me get less than a full second reply?

Originally posted as a Categorized Question.

[turnstep]

It's probably easier to just add something else to your primary key than to try and get sub-second responses. A good example is to use:

$mykey = "$^T$$";

which sets the key to a combination of the time in seconds and the process ID. This combination will be unique, as long as each time the script is run it generates a single key (e.g. a web script). If the script generates more than one key per second, add a counter:

$mykey = "$^T$$" . $x++;

If you do need sub-second times, you can look at the Time::HiRes module, although it may not work on your system, as it uses syscall and gettimeofday(2) in C. Probably easier overall to use the technique above.