I'm in and android widget and checking elapsed time between two calls of System.nanoTime() and the number is huge. How do you measure elapsed time with this? it should be a fraaction of a second and instead its much more. Thanks
The System.nanoTime()
returns a time value whose granularity is a nanosecond; i.e. 10-9 seconds, as described in the javadoc. The difference between two calls to System.nanoTime()
that are a substantial fraction of a second apart is bound to be a large number.
If you want a time measure with a larger granularity, consider System.currentTimeMillis()
... or just divide the nanosecond values by an appropriate power of 10 to suit your application.
Note that on the Android platform there are 3 distinct system clocks that support different "measures" of time; see SystemClock
. If you are programming explicitly for the Android platform, you should read the javadoc and decide which measure is most appropriate to what you are doing.
For your information, "nano-" is one of the standard prefixes defines by the International System of Units (SI) - see http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html.
If you really think that "they" got it wrong and that "nano-" is too small, you could always write a letter to the NIST. I'm sure someone would appreciate it ... :-)