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java: I am supposed to call a method 50x per second in the run method of a thread, ONLY WITH THE METHOD SLEEP (All other threads here with timer)

I have to call a method in the run method of a thread 50 times in one second, the problem is, i am only allowed to use sleep as a method!
Now the problem is how can i do that, other threads here for instance:
java- Calling a function at every interval
do that with a timer.
With a timer its easy. But i am only allowed to use sleep as a method...

while (true) {
long t0 = System.currentTimeMillis();
doSomething();
long t1 = System.currentTimeMillis();
Thread.sleep(20 - (t1-t0));
}
t1 minus t0 is the time you spent in 'doSomething', so you need to sleep for that much less than 20 mS.
You probably ought to add some checks for t1-t0 > 20.

You cannot avoid jitter in timing based on System.currentTimeMillis() (or, based on any other system clock).
This solution will not accumulate error due to jitter (unlike another answer here that measures how long the task actually took on each iteration of the loop.) Use this version if it's important for the task to be performed exactly the right number of times over a long span of time.
long dueDate = System.currentTimeMillis();
while (true) {
performThePeriodicTask();
dueDate = dueDate + TASK_PERIOD;
long sleepInterval = dueDate - System.currentTimeMillis();
if (sleepInteval > 0) {
Thread.sleep(sleepInterval);
}
}

how to run a code 60 times per second in java

if I don't control the number of times per second my code executes, when I add a line, the program varies and I have to adjust the constants again. (translated by Google)
My code running out of control:
public builder(){
while(true)
stepEvent();
}
private void stepEvent() {
setOfActions();
repaint();
}

This is just one way to do it(it's very long but VERY precise - I recommend it for game development). In this case I'm using the run() method from the Runnable interface to execute the code.
public void run(){
long lastTime = System.nanoTime();
final double ns = 1000000000.0 / 60.0;
double delta = 0;
while(true){
long now = System.nanoTime();
delta += (now - lastTime) / ns;
lastTime = now;
while(delta >= 1){
the code you want to be executed
delta--;
}
}
}
Explanation Line by Line:
Basically, I store the current time in nanoseconds in lastTime. Then in ns I store 1/60th of a second in nanoseconds and create a variable delta.
After this, I go inside the infinite while loop(it doesn't have to be infinite) and store the current time in nanoseconds once again in now. This is to take into account the amount of time that took the computer to go from the lastTime declaration line to the while loop line.
After doing all this, I add to delta the difference of now and lastTime divided by the 1/60th of a second(ns) I mentioned. This means that every time delta is equal to 1, 1/60th of a second will have passed.
Right after this, I make lastTime be the same as now. In the while loop that comes afterwards I check if delta is equal or greater than 1 and then in there you should put all the code you want to be executed 60 times per second. Don't forget to substract 1 from delta so it doesn't loop endlessly.
Analyze the code thoroughly and see if you can understand it. If you can't, I'll clarify further. I insist that this is just one possible way to do it, but there are many more ways.
Note: In some cases, you will never even need delta, but it is very helpful for some purposes.
Credit for the code: Most of this code(at least where I got it & learned it) is extracted from TheCherno's Game Programming Series
Have a great day!

import java.util.Timer;
import java.util.TimerTask;
public class HelloWorld {
public static void main(String []args) {
// number of ms in 1/60 of a second
// there will be some rounding error here,
// not sure if that's acceptable for your use case
int ms = 1000 / 60;
Timer timer = new Timer();
timer.schedule(new SayHello(), 0, ms);
}
}
class SayHello extends TimerTask {
public void run() {
System.out.println("Hello World!");
}
}

Basically, you have to execute your stepEvent every 17 ms.
With the assumption you want to run sequentially, you could stop the execution during a defined period by using Thread.sleep(millis , nanos). In this case, we will stop the thread 17ms minus the stepEvent execution time (think to add condition to avoid negative value in sleep function)
long startedTime;
for(;;){
startedTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
stepEvent();
Thread.sleep(17 - System.currentTimeMillis() + startedTime);
}
Otherwise you can use the ScheduledExecutorService which allows you to schedule code to run periodically at fixed time intervals (or after a specified delay). In this case, you can execute your step at a fixed rate every 17ms.
ScheduledExecutorService scheduledExecutorService = Executors.newSingleThreadScheduledExecutor();
scheduledExecutorService.scheduleAtFixedRate(YourClass::stepEvent, 0, 17, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS);
You can also configure to use severals thread with Executors.newScheduledThreadPool

How to delay a method's repeated execution?

I'm new to java and I'm trying to constantly add "zombie" entity to my game after a delay, and then shortening the delay as time goes on.
In my PlayState class I've got the code to spawn the entities in a position when my update(); method is run (which houses getInput(); and such. Not shown for clarity.)
public void update(long elapsed) {
this.entities.add(new Zombie(-535));
}
How would i make a delay that shortens? I'm guessing I would make the delay and then use a multiplier which i have getting smaller every 10 seconds or so, but how would I do this?

Now, I don't know much about the finer workings of your class, but this might give you a general idea of what I mean:
int counter = 50;
for(int i = 100; i >= 0; i--)
{
if(i == counter)
{
counter = counter / 2;
this.entities.add(new Zombie(-535));
}
}
Suppose i is the the total run-time of the game, and counter represents a percent of the game when you want to add a zombie.
If you want to add a zombie after 50% of the run-time (here, 100 seconds), then as the time reduces, you check if the time has come to add a zombie (Here, 50 seconds).
What I've done here is reduce the delay to half, and continue checking if the time has come to add a zombie.

Maybe you could call sleep on your thread of execution:
int sleepInMs = 5000
Thread.sleep(sleepInMs);
sleepInMs+=1000; //Then of course handle the case when sleepInMs == 0
Really need more information about your implementation.

For a simple delay, use "delay ms;"
Edit ms for the number of milliseconds you want. 1000 milliseconds is one second

Java calculations that takes X amount of time

This is just a hypothetical question, but could be a way to get around an issue I have been having.
Imagine you want to be able to time a calculation function based not on the answer, but on the time it takes to calculating. So instead of finding out what a + b is, you wish to continue perform some calculation while time < x seconds.
Look at this pseudo code:
public static void performCalculationsForTime(int seconds)
{
// Get start time
int millisStart = System.currentTimeMillis();
// Perform calculation to find the 1000th digit of PI
// Check if the given amount of seconds have passed since millisStart
// If number of seconds have not passed, redo the 1000th PI digit calculation
// At this point the time has passed, return the function.
}
Now I know that I am horrible, despicable person for using precious CPU cycles to simple get time to pass, but what I am wondering is:
A) Is this possible and would JVM start complaining about non-responsiveness?
B) If it is possible, what calculations would be best to try to perform?
Update - Answer:
Based on the answers and comments, the answer seems to be that "Yes, this is possible. But only if it is not done in Android main UI thread, because the user's GUI will be become unresponsive and will throw an ANR after 5 seconds."

A) Is this possible and would JVM start complaining about non-responsiveness?
It is possible, and if you run it in the background, neither JVM nor Dalvik will complain.
B) If it is possible, what calculations would be best to try to perform?
If the objective is to just run any calculation for x seconds, just keep adding 1 to a sum until the required time has reached. Off the top of my head, something like:
public static void performCalculationsForTime(int seconds)
{
// Get start time
int secondsStart = System.currentTimeMillis()/1000;
int requiredEndTime = millisStart + seconds;
float sum = 0;
while(secondsStart != requiredEndTime) {
sum = sum + 0.1;
secondsStart = System.currentTimeMillis()/1000;
}
}

You can and JVM won't complain if your code is not part of some complex system that actually tracks thread execution time.
long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
while(System.currentTimeMillis() - startTime < 100000) {
// do something
}
Or even a for loop that checks time only every 1000 cycles.
for (int i = 0; ;i++) {
if (i % 1000 == 0 && System.currentTimeMillis() - startTime < 100000)
break;
// do something
}
As for your second question, the answer is probably calculating some value that can always be improved upon, like your PI digits example.

Wait for system time to continue application

I've written a class to continue a started JAVA application if the current second is a multiple of 5 (i.e. Calender.SECOND % 5 == 0)
The class code is presented below, what I'm curious about is, am I doing this the right way? It doesn't seem like an elegant solution, blocking the execution like this and getting the instance over and over.
public class Synchronizer{
private static Calendar c;
public static void timeInSync(){
do{
c = Calendar.getInstance();
}
while(c.get(Calendar.SECOND) % 5 != 0);
}
}
Synchronizer.timeInSync() is called in another class's constructor and an instance of that class is created at the start of the main method. Then the application runs forever with a TimerTask that's called every 5 seconds.
Is there a cleaner solution for synchronizing the time?
Update:
I think I did not clearly stated but what I'm looking for here is to synchronization with the system time without doing busy waiting.
So I need to be able to get
12:19:00
12:19:05
12:19:10
...

What you have now is called busy waiting (also sometimes referred as polling), and yes its inefficient in terms of processor usage and also in terms of energy usage. You code executes whenever the OS allows it, and in doing so it prevents the use of a CPU for other work, or when there is no other work it prevents the CPU from taking a nap, wasting energy (heating the CPU, draining the battery...).
What you should do is put your thread to sleep until the time where you want to do something arrives. This allows the CPU to perform other tasks or go to sleep.
There is a method on java.lang.Thread to do just that: Thread.sleep(long milliseconds) (it also has a cousin taking an additional nanos parameter, but the nanos may be ignored by the VM, and that kind of precision is rarely needed).
So first you determine when you need to do some work. Then you sleep until then. A naive implementation could look like that:
public static void waitUntil(long timestamp) {
long millis = timestamp - System.currentTimeMillis();
// return immediately if time is already in the past
if (millis <= 0)
return;
try {
Thread.sleep(millis);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
throw new RuntimeException(e.getMessage(), e);
}
}
This works fine if you don't have too strict requirements on precisely hitting the time, you can expect it to return reasonably close to the specified time (a few ten ms away probably) if the time isn't too far in the future (a few secs tops). You have however no guarantees that occasionally when the OS is really busy that it possily returns much later.
A slightly more accurate method is to determine the reuired sleep time, sleep for half the time, evaluate required sleep again, sleep again half the time and so on until the required sleep time becomes very small, then busy wait the remaining few milliseconds.
However System.currentTimeMillis() does not guarantee the actual resolution of time; it may change once every millisecond, but it might as well only change every ten ms by 10 (this depends on the platform). Same goes for System.nanoTime().
Waiting for an exact point in time is not possible in high level programming languages in a multi-tasking environment (practically everywhere nowadays). If you have strict requirements, you need to turn to the operating system specifics to create an interrupt at the specified time and handle the event in the interrupt (that means assembler or at least C for the interrupt handler). You won't need that in most normal applications, a few ms +/- usually don't matter in a game/application.

As #ChrisK suggests, you could simplify by just making a direct call to System.currentTimeMillis().
For example:
long time = 0;
do
{
time = System.currentTimeMillis();
} while (time % 5000 != 0);
Note that you need to change the comparison value to 5000 because the representation of the time is in milliseconds.
Also, there are possible pitfalls to doing any comparison so directly like this, as the looping call depends on processor availability and whatnot, so there is a chance that an implementation such as this could make one call that returns:
`1411482384999`
And then the next call in the loop return
`1411482385001`
Meaning that your condition has been skipped by virtue of hardware availability.
If you want to use a built in scheduler, I suggest looking at the answer to a similar question here java: run a function after a specific number of seconds

You should use
System.nanoTime()
instead of
System.currentTimeMillis()
because it returns the measured elapsed time instead of the system time, so nanoTime is not influenced by system time changes.
public class Synchronizer
{
public static void timeInSync()
{
long lastNanoTime = System.nanoTime();
long nowTime = System.nanoTime();
while(nowTime/1000000 - lastNanoTime /1000000 < 5000 )
{
nowTime = System.nanoTime();
}
}
}

The first main point is that you must never use busy-waiting. In java you can avoid busy-waiting by using either Object.wait(timeout) or Thread.sleep(timeout). The later is more suitable for your case, because your case doesn't require losing monitor lock.
Next, you can use two approaches to wait until your time condition is satisfied. You can either precalculate your whole wait time or wait for small time intervals in loop, checking the condition.
I will illustrate both approaches here:
private static long nextWakeTime(long time) {
if (time / 1000 % 5 == 0) { // current time is multiple of five seconds
return time;
}
return (time / 1000 / 5 + 1) * 5000;
}
private static void waitUsingCalculatedTime() {
long currentTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
long wakeTime = nextWakeTime(currentTime);
while (currentTime < wakeTime) {
try {
System.out.printf("Current time: %d%n", currentTime);
System.out.printf("Wake time: %d%n", wakeTime);
System.out.printf("Waiting: %d ms%n", wakeTime - currentTime);
Thread.sleep(wakeTime - currentTime);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
// ignore
}
currentTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
}
}
private static void waitUsingSmallTime() {
while (System.currentTimeMillis() / 1000 % 5 != 0) {
try {
System.out.printf("Current time: %d%n", System.currentTimeMillis());
Thread.sleep(100);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
// ignore
}
}
}
As you can see, waiting for the precalculated time is more complex, but it is more precise and more efficient (since in general case it will be done in single iteration). Waiting iteratively for small time interval is simpler, but less efficient and precise (precision is dependent on the selected size of the time interval).
Also please note how I calculate if the time condition is satisfied:
(time / 1000 % 5 == 0)
In first step you need to calculate seconds and only then check if the are multiple of five. Checking by time % 5000 == 0 as suggested in other answer is wrong, as it is true only for the first millisecond of each fifth second.