Better way of getting time in milliseconds in javascript?

Question

Is there an alternative in JavaScript of getting time in milliseconds using the date object, or at least a way to reuse that object, without having to instantiate a new object e

Answer 1

Try Date.now().

The skipping is most likely due to garbage collection. Typically garbage collection can be avoided by reusing variables as much as possible, but I can't say specifically what methods you can use to reduce garbage collection pauses.

Answer 2

This is a very old question - but still for reference if others are looking at it - requestAnimationFrame() is the right way to handle animation in modern browsers:

UPDATE: The mozilla link shows how to do this - I didn't feel like repeating the text behind the link ;)

Answer 3

If you have date object like

var date = new Date('2017/12/03');

then there is inbuilt method in javascript for getting date in milliseconds format which is valueOf()

date.valueOf(); //1512239400000 in milliseconds format

Answer 4

As far that I know you only can get time with Date.

Date.now is the solution but is not available everywhere : https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Date/now.

var currentTime = +new Date();

This gives you the current time in milliseconds.

For your jumps. If you compute interpolations correctly according to the delta frame time and you don't have some rounding number error, I bet for the garbage collector (GC).

If there is a lot of created temporary object in your loop, garbage collection has to lock the thread to make some cleanup and memory re-organization.

With Chrome you can see how much time the GC is spending in the Timeline panel.

EDIT: Since my answer, Date.now() should be considered as the best option as it is supported everywhere and on IE >= 9.

Answer 5

I know this is a pretty old thread, but to keep things up to date and more relevant, you can use the more accurate performance.now() functionality to get finer grain timing in javascript.

window.performance = window.performance || {};
performance.now = (function() {
    return performance.now       ||
        performance.mozNow    ||
        performance.msNow     ||
        performance.oNow      ||
        performance.webkitNow ||            
        Date.now  /*none found - fallback to browser default */
})();