gettimeofday() can fail and presumably, so can time().
Keep an eye on it.

Since we have no data on this at all so far, we just
retry on failure (and log the event), assuming that
this is just an intermittant failure. This might of
course hang the threat until we succeed. Once we know
more about these failures, an appropriate more clever
scheme may be picked (only try so many times per thread,
etc., if that fails, return last "good" time() we got or
some such).  Using sql_print_information() to log as this
probably only occurs in high load scenarios where the debug-
trace likely is disabled (or might interfere with testing
the effect).  No test-case as this is a non-deterministic
issue.