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I'm looking into the exact implications of using QueryPerformanceCounter in our system and am trying to understand it's impact on the application. I can see from running it on my 4-core single cpu machine that it takes around 230ns to run. When I run it on a 24-core 4 cpu xeon it takes around 1.4ms to run. More interestingly on my machine when running it in multiple threads they don't impact each other. But on the multi-cpu machine the threads cause some sort of interaction that causes them to block each other. I'm wondering if there is some shared resource on the bus that they all query? What exactly happens when I call QueryPerformanceCounter and what does it really measure?