Thread.Sleep for less than 1 millisecond

Why?
Usually there are a very limited number of CPUs and cores on one machine - you get just a small number if independent execution units.

From the other hands there are a number of processes and many more threads. Each thread requires some processor time, that is assigned internally by Windows core processes. Usually Windows blocks all threads and gives a certain amount of CPU core time to particular threads, then it switches the context to other threads.

When you call Thread.Sleep no matter how small you kill the whole time span Windows gave to the thread, as there is no reason to simply wait for it and the context is switched straight away. It can take a few ms when Windows gives your thread some CPU next time.

What to use?
Alternatively, you can spin your CPU, spinning is not a terrible thing to do and can be very useful. It is for example used in System.Collections.Concurrent namespace a lot with non-blocking collections, e.g.:

SpinWait sw = new SpinWait();
sw.SpinOnce();

You can't do this. A single sleep call will typically block for far longer than a millisecond (it's OS and system dependent, but in my experience, Thread.Sleep(1) tends to block for somewhere between 12-15ms).

Windows, in general, is not designed as a real-time operating system. This type of control is typically impossible to achieve on normal (desktop/server) versions of Windows.

The closest you can get is typically to spin and eat CPU cycles until you've achieved the wait time you want (measured with a high performance counter). This, however, is pretty awful - you'll eat up an entire CPU, and even then, you'll likely get preempted by the OS at times and effectively "sleep" for longer than 1ms...

The code below will most definitely offer a more precise way of blocking, rather than calling Thread.Sleep(x); (although this method will block the thread, not put it to sleep). Below we are using the StopWatch class to measure how long we need to keep looping and block the calling thread.

using System.Diagnostics;

private static void NOP(double durationSeconds)
{
    var durationTicks = Math.Round(durationSeconds * Stopwatch.Frequency);
    var sw = Stopwatch.StartNew();

    while (sw.ElapsedTicks < durationTicks)
    {

    }
}

Example usage,

private static void Main()
{
    NOP(5); // Wait 5 seconds.

    Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");

    Console.ReadLine();
}