System.currentTimeMillis ();并不是衡量算法性能的好方法。它衡量的是你作为用户看电脑屏幕的总时间。它还包括在您的计算机上运行的所有其他事情所消耗的时间。如果您的工作站上运行了许多程序，这可能会产生巨大的不同。

正确的方法是使用java.lang.management包。

来自http://nadeausoftware.com/articles/2008/03/java_tip_how_get_cpu_and_user_time_benchmarking网站(档案链接):

“用户时间”是运行应用程序自己的代码所花费的时间。 “系统时间”是代表应用程序运行操作系统代码所花费的时间(例如用于I/O)。

getCpuTime()方法给出了它们的和:

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;
    }

}

long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
// code goes here
long finishTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
long elapsedTime = finishTime - startTime; // elapsed time in milliseconds

总有一些过时的方法:

long startTime = System.nanoTime();
methodToTime();
long endTime = System.nanoTime();

long duration = (endTime - startTime);  //divide by 1000000 to get milliseconds.

我实现了一个简单的定时器，我认为它真的很有用:

public class Timer{
    private static long start_time;

    public static double tic(){
        return start_time = System.nanoTime();
    }

    public static double toc(){
        return (System.nanoTime()-start_time)/1000000000.0;
    }

}

这样你就可以计算一个或多个动作的时间:

Timer.tic();
// Code 1
System.out.println("Code 1 runtime: "+Timer.toc()+" seconds.");
// Code 2
System.out.println("(Code 1 + Code 2) runtime: "+Timer.toc()+"seconds");
Timer.tic();
// Code 3
System.out.println("Code 3 runtime: "+Timer.toc()+" seconds.");

在Java 8中引入了一个名为Instant的新类。根据文件:

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.

这可以用于:

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

打印pt7.001。

如果你想要时间

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