How do I time a method's execution in Java?

Question

1. How do I get a method\'s execution time?
2. Is there a Timer utility class for things like timing how long a task takes, etc?

Mos

Answer 1

System.currentTimeMillis(); IS NOT a good approach for measuring the performance of your algorithms. It measures the total time you experience as a user watching the computer screen. It includes also time consumed by everything else running on your computer in the background. This could make a huge difference in case you have a lot of programs running on your workstation.

Proper approach is using java.lang.management package.

From http://nadeausoftware.com/articles/2008/03/java_tip_how_get_cpu_and_user_time_benchmarking website (archive link):

• "User time" is the time spent running your application's own code.
• "System time" is the time spent running OS code on behalf of your application (such as for I/O).

getCpuTime() method gives you sum of those:

import java.lang.management.ManagementFactory;
import java.lang.management.ThreadMXBean;

public class CPUUtils {

    /** Get CPU time in nanoseconds. */
    public static long getCpuTime( ) {
        ThreadMXBean bean = ManagementFactory.getThreadMXBean( );
        return bean.isCurrentThreadCpuTimeSupported( ) ?
            bean.getCurrentThreadCpuTime( ) : 0L;
    }

    /** Get user time in nanoseconds. */
    public static long getUserTime( ) {
        ThreadMXBean bean = ManagementFactory.getThreadMXBean( );
        return bean.isCurrentThreadCpuTimeSupported( ) ?
            bean.getCurrentThreadUserTime( ) : 0L;
    }

    /** Get system time in nanoseconds. */
    public static long getSystemTime( ) {
        ThreadMXBean bean = ManagementFactory.getThreadMXBean( );
        return bean.isCurrentThreadCpuTimeSupported( ) ?
            (bean.getCurrentThreadCpuTime( ) - bean.getCurrentThreadUserTime( )) : 0L;
    }

}