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

Question

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

Most of the searches on Google return results for timers that schedule threads and tasks, which is not what I want.

Answer 1

Just a small twist, if you don't use tooling and want to time methods with low execution time: execute it many times, each time doubling the number of times it is executed until you reach a second, or so. Thus, the time of the Call to System.nanoTime and so forth, nor the accuracy of System.nanoTime does affect the result much.

    int runs = 0, runsPerRound = 10;
    long begin = System.nanoTime(), end;
    do {
        for (int i=0; i<runsPerRound; ++i) timedMethod();
        end = System.nanoTime();
        runs += runsPerRound;
        runsPerRound *= 2;
    } while (runs < Integer.MAX_VALUE / 2 && 1000000000L > end - begin);
    System.out.println("Time for timedMethod() is " + 
        0.000000001 * (end-begin) / runs + " seconds");

Of course, the caveats about using the wall clock apply: influences of JIT-compilation, multiple threads / processes etc. Thus, you need to first execute the method a lot of times first, such that the JIT compiler does its work, and then repeat this test multiple times and take the lowest execution time.

Answer 2

Also We can use StopWatch class of Apache commons for measuring the time.

Sample code

org.apache.commons.lang.time.StopWatch sw = new org.apache.commons.lang.time.StopWatch();

System.out.println("getEventFilterTreeData :: Start Time : " + sw.getTime());
sw.start();

// Method execution code

sw.stop();
System.out.println("getEventFilterTreeData :: End Time : " + sw.getTime());

Answer 3

Gathered all possible ways together into one place.

Date

Date startDate = Calendar.getInstance().getTime();
long d_StartTime = new Date().getTime();
Thread.sleep(1000 * 4);
Date endDate = Calendar.getInstance().getTime();
long d_endTime = new Date().getTime();
System.out.format("StartDate : %s, EndDate : %s \n", startDate, endDate);
System.out.format("Milli = %s, ( D_Start : %s, D_End : %s ) \n", (d_endTime - d_StartTime),d_StartTime, d_endTime);

System.currentTimeMillis()

long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
Thread.sleep(1000 * 4);
long endTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
long duration = (endTime - startTime);  
System.out.format("Milli = %s, ( S_Start : %s, S_End : %s ) \n", duration, startTime, endTime );
System.out.println("Human-Readable format : "+millisToShortDHMS( duration ) );

Human Readable Format

public static String millisToShortDHMS(long duration) {
    String res = "";    // java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;
    long days       = TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS.toDays(duration);
    long hours      = TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS.toHours(duration) -
                      TimeUnit.DAYS.toHours(TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS.toDays(duration));
    long minutes    = TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS.toMinutes(duration) -
                      TimeUnit.HOURS.toMinutes(TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS.toHours(duration));
    long seconds    = TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS.toSeconds(duration) -
                      TimeUnit.MINUTES.toSeconds(TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS.toMinutes(duration));
    long millis     = TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS.toMillis(duration) - 
                      TimeUnit.SECONDS.toMillis(TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS.toSeconds(duration));

    if (days == 0)      res = String.format("%02d:%02d:%02d.%04d", hours, minutes, seconds, millis);
    else                res = String.format("%dd %02d:%02d:%02d.%04d", days, hours, minutes, seconds, millis);
    return res;
}

Guava: Google Stopwatch^JAR « An object of Stopwatch is to measures elapsed time in nanoseconds.

com.google.common.base.Stopwatch g_SW = Stopwatch.createUnstarted();
g_SW.start();
Thread.sleep(1000 * 4);
g_SW.stop();
System.out.println("Google StopWatch  : "+g_SW);

Apache Commons Lang^JAR « StopWatch provides a convenient API for timings.

org.apache.commons.lang3.time.StopWatch sw = new StopWatch();
sw.start();     
Thread.sleep(1000 * 4);     
sw.stop();
System.out.println("Apache StopWatch  : "+ millisToShortDHMS(sw.getTime()) );

JODA-TIME

public static void jodaTime() throws InterruptedException, ParseException{
    java.text.SimpleDateFormat ms_SDF = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm:ss.SSS");
    String start = ms_SDF.format( new Date() ); // java.util.Date

    Thread.sleep(10000);

    String end = ms_SDF.format( new Date() );       
    System.out.println("Start:"+start+"\t Stop:"+end);

    Date date_1 = ms_SDF.parse(start);
    Date date_2 = ms_SDF.parse(end);        
    Interval interval = new org.joda.time.Interval( date_1.getTime(), date_2.getTime() );
    Period period = interval.toPeriod(); //org.joda.time.Period

    System.out.format("%dY/%dM/%dD, %02d:%02d:%02d.%04d \n", 
        period.getYears(), period.getMonths(), period.getDays(),
        period.getHours(), period.getMinutes(), period.getSeconds(), period.getMillis());
}

Java date time API from Java 8 « A Duration object represents a period of time between two Instant objects.

Instant start = java.time.Instant.now();
    Thread.sleep(1000);
Instant end = java.time.Instant.now();
Duration between = java.time.Duration.between(start, end);
System.out.println( between ); // PT1.001S
System.out.format("%dD, %02d:%02d:%02d.%04d \n", between.toDays(),
        between.toHours(), between.toMinutes(), between.getSeconds(), between.toMillis()); // 0D, 00:00:01.1001 

---

Spring Framework provides StopWatch utility class to measure elapsed time in Java.

StopWatch sw = new org.springframework.util.StopWatch();
sw.start("Method-1"); // Start a named task
    Thread.sleep(500);
sw.stop();

sw.start("Method-2");
    Thread.sleep(300);
sw.stop();

sw.start("Method-3");
    Thread.sleep(200);
sw.stop();

System.out.println("Total time in milliseconds for all tasks :\n"+sw.getTotalTimeMillis());
System.out.println("Table describing all tasks performed :\n"+sw.prettyPrint());

System.out.format("Time taken by the last task : [%s]:[%d]", 
        sw.getLastTaskName(),sw.getLastTaskTimeMillis());

System.out.println("\n Array of the data for tasks performed « Task Name: Time Taken");
TaskInfo[] listofTasks = sw.getTaskInfo();
for (TaskInfo task : listofTasks) {
    System.out.format("[%s]:[%d]\n", 
            task.getTaskName(), task.getTimeMillis());
}

OutPut:

Total time in milliseconds for all tasks :
999
Table describing all tasks performed :
StopWatch '': running time (millis) = 999
-----------------------------------------
ms     %     Task name
-----------------------------------------
00500  050%  Method-1
00299  030%  Method-2
00200  020%  Method-3

Time taken by the last task : [Method-3]:[200]
 Array of the data for tasks performed « Task Name: Time Taken
[Method-1]:[500]
[Method-2]:[299]
[Method-3]:[200]

Answer 4

I have written a method to print the method execution time in a much readable form. For example, to calculate the factorial of 1 Million, it takes approximately 9 minutes. So the execution time get printed as:

Execution Time: 9 Minutes, 36 Seconds, 237 MicroSeconds, 806193 NanoSeconds

The code is here:

public class series
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        long startTime = System.nanoTime();

        long n = 10_00_000;
        printFactorial(n);

        long endTime = System.nanoTime();
        printExecutionTime(startTime, endTime);

    }

    public static void printExecutionTime(long startTime, long endTime)
    {
        long time_ns = endTime - startTime;
        long time_ms = TimeUnit.NANOSECONDS.toMillis(time_ns);
        long time_sec = TimeUnit.NANOSECONDS.toSeconds(time_ns);
        long time_min = TimeUnit.NANOSECONDS.toMinutes(time_ns);
        long time_hour = TimeUnit.NANOSECONDS.toHours(time_ns);

        System.out.print("\nExecution Time: ");
        if(time_hour > 0)
            System.out.print(time_hour + " Hours, ");
        if(time_min > 0)
            System.out.print(time_min % 60 + " Minutes, ");
        if(time_sec > 0)
            System.out.print(time_sec % 60 + " Seconds, ");
        if(time_ms > 0)
            System.out.print(time_ms % 1E+3 + " MicroSeconds, ");
        if(time_ns > 0)
            System.out.print(time_ns % 1E+6 + " NanoSeconds");
    }
}

Answer 5

You can use stopwatch class from spring core project:

Code:

StopWatch stopWatch = new StopWatch()
stopWatch.start();  //start stopwatch
// write your function or line of code.
stopWatch.stop();  //stop stopwatch
stopWatch.getTotalTimeMillis() ; ///get total time

Documentation for Stopwatch: Simple stop watch, allowing for timing of a number of tasks, exposing total running time and running time for each named task. Conceals use of System.currentTimeMillis(), improving the readability of application code and reducing the likelihood of calculation errors. Note that this object is not designed to be thread-safe and does not use synchronization. This class is normally used to verify performance during proof-of-concepts and in development, rather than as part of production applications.

Answer 6

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:

• "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;
    }

}