Effect of usleep(0) in C++ on Linux

Technically it should have no effect. But you must remember that the value passed is used as a minimum, and not an absolute, therefore the system is free to use the smallest possible interval instead.

I just wanted to point out about the time command used here. You should use /usr/bin/time instead of only time command if you want to check your program memory,cpu,time stat. When you call time without full path then built-in time command is called. Look at the difference.

without full path:

# time -v ./a.out
-bash: -v: command not found

real    0m0.001s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.001s

with full path:

# /usr/bin/time -v ./a.out
Command being timed: "./a.out"
User time (seconds): 0.00
System time (seconds): 0.00
Percent of CPU this job got: 0%
Elapsed (wall clock) time (h:mm:ss or m:ss): 0:10.87
Average shared text size (kbytes): 0
Average unshared data size (kbytes): 0
Average stack size (kbytes): 0
Average total size (kbytes): 0
Maximum resident set size (kbytes): 0
Average resident set size (kbytes): 0
Major (requiring I/O) page faults: 0
Minor (reclaiming a frame) page faults: 220
Voluntary context switches: 10001
Involuntary context switches: 1
Swaps: 0
File system inputs: 0
File system outputs: 0
Socket messages sent: 0
Socket messages received: 0
Signals delivered: 0
Page size (bytes): 4096
Exit status: 0

use man time for /usr/bin/time manual and use help time for built in time information.

I would have to look at the source to make sure, but my guess is that it's not quite "no effect", but it's probably still less than usleep(1) - there's still the function call overhead, which can be measurable in a tight loop, even if the library call simply checks its arguments and returns immediately, avoiding the more usual process of setting up a timer/callback and calling the scheduler.