Drawback of programatically changing windows system time too frequently

Question

I have a simulator application which writes some enrypted data into a text file. The information that it writes also has the timestamp (which the application picks from system time) along with it which I can not see. I have automated this whole task of sending random data from application to the text file but I want that the records must be written with some time interval in between.
For this I can either put delay in my automation script or I can change the system time every time a new record is inserted.
If I adopt the second approach i.e. I programatically change the system time very frequently (about once in every second) would it cause any harmful effect on the Windows system on which I am running this application ? Would any other critical system processes get affected by it ? Is this approach advisable ?

Answer 1

Changing the System Time might solve your problem, but at the same time it might have adverse affects on time dependent other applications sharing the same System. For example, the automatic antivirus signature updates are time dependent and might get impacted by explicitly changing the System Time or an automatic System Time adjustment for day light saving might get triggered at an inappropriate time. Keeping this issue in mind, the best bet would be to ensure that your application runs on an isolated environment i.e. ensure that other time dependent applications are not present in the same system and also to ensure that auto updates are kept off.

Answer 2

The best option here is just going to be putting in a delay in the automation script. I can't think of any problems that would arise from changing the system clock every second, but it's best just to let that be handled by the CMOS and any time syncing instead of setting it to change every second.

Answer 3

Changing the system time requires administrative privileges, so users of your application will be unable to run it as ordinary users.