Throttling a mousemove event to fire no more than 5 times a second

Question

I have an event handler bound to the mousemove handler which will log the current mouse position via console.log().I am aiming to have the event fire no more than 5 times a

Answer 1

Add a variable that tracks when an event has just occurred, and sleep with setTimeout before allowing the next event.

var timesPerSecond = 5; // how many times to fire the event per second
var wait = false;
$(document).on('mousemove', function (event) {
    // don't handle events when one has just occurred
    if (!wait) {
        // fire the event
        logMouse(event);
        // stop any further events
        wait = true;
        // after a fraction of a second, allow events again
        setTimeout(function () {
            wait = false;
        }, 1000 / timesPerSecond);
    } 
});