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

If you want wall-clock time

long start_time = System.currentTimeMillis();
object.method();
long end_time = System.currentTimeMillis();
long execution_time = end_time - start_time;

Answer 2

With Java 8 you can do also something like this with every normal methods:

Object returnValue = TimeIt.printTime(() -> methodeWithReturnValue());
//do stuff with your returnValue

with TimeIt like:

public class TimeIt {

public static <T> T printTime(Callable<T> task) {
    T call = null;
    try {
        long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
        call = task.call();
        System.out.print((System.currentTimeMillis() - startTime) / 1000d + "s");
    } catch (Exception e) {
        //...
    }
    return call;
}
}

With this methode you can make easy time measurement anywhere in your code without breaking it. In this simple example i just print the time. May you add a Switch for TimeIt, e.g. to only print the time in DebugMode or something.

If you are working with Function you can do somthing like this:

Function<Integer, Integer> yourFunction= (n) -> {
        return IntStream.range(0, n).reduce(0, (a, b) -> a + b);
    };

Integer returnValue = TimeIt.printTime2(yourFunction).apply(10000);
//do stuff with your returnValue

public static <T, R> Function<T, R> printTime2(Function<T, R> task) {
    return (t) -> {
        long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
        R apply = task.apply(t);
        System.out.print((System.currentTimeMillis() - startTime) / 1000d
                + "s");
        return apply;
    };
}

Answer 3

I modified the code from correct answer to get result in seconds:

long startTime = System.nanoTime();

methodCode ...

long endTime = System.nanoTime();
double duration = (double)(endTime - startTime) / (Math.pow(10, 9));
Log.v(TAG, "MethodName time (s) = " + duration);

Answer 4

You can use Perf4j. Very cool utility. Usage is simple

String watchTag = "target.SomeMethod";
StopWatch stopWatch = new LoggingStopWatch(watchTag);
Result result = null; // Result is a type of a return value of a method
try {
    result = target.SomeMethod();
    stopWatch.stop(watchTag + ".success");
} catch (Exception e) {
    stopWatch.stop(watchTag + ".fail", "Exception was " + e);
    throw e; 
}

More information can be found in Developer Guide

Edit: Project seems dead

Answer 5

You can try this way if just want know the time.

long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
//@ Method call
System.out.println("Total time [ms]: " + (System.currentTimeMillis() - startTime));    

Answer 6

In Java 8 a new class named Instant is introduced. As per doc:

Instant represents the start of a nanosecond on the time line. This class is useful for generating a time stamp to represent machine time. The range of an instant requires the storage of a number larger than a long. To achieve this, the class stores a long representing epoch-seconds and an int representing nanosecond-of-second, which will always be between 0 and 999,999,999. The epoch-seconds are measured from the standard Java epoch of 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z where instants after the epoch have positive values, and earlier instants have negative values. For both the epoch-second and nanosecond parts, a larger value is always later on the time-line than a smaller value.

This can be used as:

Instant start = Instant.now();
try {
    Thread.sleep(7000);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
}
Instant end = Instant.now();
System.out.println(Duration.between(start, end));

It prints PT7.001S.