Java Cookbook

High-Resolution Timers

Problem

You need to time how long something takes.

Solution

Call System.getTimeMillis( ) twice, and subtract the first result from the second result.

Discussion

Needing a timer is such a common thing that, instead of making you depend on some external library, the developers of Java have built it in. The System class contains a static method that returns the current time (since 1970) in milliseconds. Thus, to time some event, use this:

long start = System.getTimeMillis(  ); 
method_to_be_timed(  ); 
long end = System.getTimeMillis(  ); l
ong elapsed = end - start;    // time in msec.

Here is a short example to measure how long it takes a user to press return. We divide the time in milliseconds by a thousand to get seconds, and print it nicely using a NumberFormat:

// Timer0.java 
long t0, t1; 
System.out.println("Press return when ready"); 
t0=System.currentTimeMillis(  ); 
int b; 
do { 
    b = System.in.read(  ); 
} while (b!='\r' && b != '\n');

t1=System.currentTimeMillis(  ); 
double deltaT = t1-t0; 
System.out.println("You took " +  
    DecimalFormat.getInstance(  ).format(deltaT/1000.) + " seconds.");

This longer example uses the same technique, but computes a large number of square roots and writes each one to a discard file using the getDevNull( ) method from Section 2.5:

import java.io.*; import java.text.*; /** * Timer for processing sqrt and I/O operations. */ public class Timer { public static void main(String argv[]) { try { new Timer().run( ); } catch (IOException e) { System.err.println(e); ...