Process.clock_gettime allows getting the real time in nanoseconds as
well as allowing one to get a monotonic timestamp. This offers greater
accuracy without the overhead of having to allocate a Time instance. In
general using Time.now/Time.new is about 2x slower than using
Process.clock_gettime(). For example:
require 'benchmark/ips'
Benchmark.ips do |bench|
bench.report 'Time.now' do
Time.now.to_f
end
bench.report 'clock_gettime' do
Process.clock_gettime(Process::CLOCK_MONOTONIC, :millisecond)
end
bench.compare!
end
Running this benchmark gives:
Calculating -------------------------------------
Time.now 108.052k i/100ms
clock_gettime 125.984k i/100ms
-------------------------------------------------
Time.now 2.343M (± 7.1%) i/s - 11.670M
clock_gettime 4.979M (± 0.8%) i/s - 24.945M
Comparison:
clock_gettime: 4979393.8 i/s
Time.now: 2342986.8 i/s - 2.13x slower
Another benefit of using Process.clock_gettime() is that we can simplify
the code a bit since it can give timestamps in nanoseconds out of the
box.
Previously we'd create a separate Metric instance for every method call
that would exceed the method call threshold. This is problematic because
it doesn't provide us with information to accurately get the _total_
execution time of a particular method. For example, if the method
"Foo#bar" was called 4 times with a runtime of ~10 milliseconds we'd end
up with 4 different Metric instances. If we were to then get the
average/95th percentile/etc of the timings this would be roughly 10
milliseconds. However, the _actual_ total time spent in this method
would be around 40 milliseconds.
To solve this problem we now create a single Metric instance per method.
This Metric instance contains the _total_ real/CPU time and the call
count for every instrumented method.
