System Clock

[sehudson]

I am running 2 sorting algorithms (Merge and Insertion) on a series of integer arrays. My assignment is to run the algorithms and do an analysis on the efficiency of each one. I am supposed to use the system clock to time the algorithms, but for some reason, no measurable time seems to be elapsing, at least from the system clock perspective. I am using

    public static String now(String dateFormat) {
        Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
        SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat(dateFormat);
        return sdf.format(cal.getTime());

    }

so when I need to get the time I am setting my time string(startAlgorithm and stopAlgorithm) to:

now("H:mm:ss:SSS");

Problem is They are both coming back with the same time, and I am setting the strings at the beginning and the end of the sort(which involves loops and calls to other methods so I know time is elapsing. I don't think I can get any more precision than SSS (millilseconds), can I?

[dlorde]

For measuring elapsed time, try System.nanoTime().

When timing code it's usually also worth running your algorithms multiple times and alternating between them to even out fluctuations due to caching, system performance, garbage collection, etc. It's easy to end up measuring the time it takes to do stuff that's actually quite unrelated to your code.

[sehudson]

thanks for the reply.