RPT reporting 0ms in measurements

Currently, RPT can only report times in millisecond precision. Anything below gets rounded up or down. In most cases this is fine. However, it becomes problematic when the time is less than 1ms, where RPT reports 0ms instead. We do not think it is a correct behavior. We can keep reiterating the statement simply because there is no such thing as zero in the physical world we live in. As such, we would like RPT to display times in better precision.

Java currently provides two methods for time reporting. One is currentTimeMillis used by RPT we believe, and the other nanoTime. So Java does actually provide a way to measure time in nanosecond resolution.

The official Java Doc from Oracle says, regarding this method, “This method can only be used to measure elapsed time and is not related to any other notion of system or wall-clock time. The value returned represents nanoseconds since some fixed but arbitrary origin time (perhaps in the future, so values may be negative). The same origin is used by all invocations of this method in an instance of a Java virtual machine; other virtual machine instances are likely to use a different origin.”

It seems that there are some restrictions in using the method. However, it is clearly stated that it can be used to measure elapsed time, which is exactly what RPT does, which is also exactly what we do all the time with our products here. We are not trying to get nanosecond precision for a certain point in time. All we need is elapsed time with better precision and nanoTime seems like a good fit.