Wait, what? If I call sleep(1), you're saying it's going to sleep for THIRTY EIGHT SECONDS?
People, it's right there in the man pages.
Are you maybe thinking about WinAPI's Sleep? That's ms-denominated. It would make sense that attempting to sleep for 1 millisecond wouldn't work, and would build in the time for the scheduler and the timeslices for every other process. We're talking about OpenSSL and POSIX sleep(3).
