Difference between System.currentTimeMillis() and Date getTime()?

Question

I was hoping to squeeze a tiny performance gain out of many calls to a function that returns a timestamp. The function looks like this:

public static long get_n         


        

Answer 1

No difference, except for the very slight lag caused by allocating a Date object.

From the javadoc the the default constructor of Date:

Allocates a Date object and initializes it so that it represents the time at which it was allocated, measured to the nearest millisecond.

A Date is just a thin wrapper around the epoch milliseconds, without any concept of timezones. Only when rendered to a String is timezone considered, but that is handled by the Locale class.