System.out.err & System.out interleaving in Java - java

To work out how much time is taken to perform an algorithm, I do this in the main method, but it does not print the time as it gets interleaved with System.print.
long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
A1.Print(2);
long endTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
System.err.print(endTime - startTime);
and if the class A is this:
public class A{
public void Print(int n){
for(int i = 0; i <=n; i++){
System.out.println(i)
}
}
it prints
0
1
2
and in this line it is the amount of time that is supposed go through that loop, but it simply won't, so it won't print like this:
0
1
2
1
Here the last line or 1 is the millisecond taken for the algorithm. The textbook says you MUST use System.err. and figure out a way to prevent interleaving.

You could do something like
System.setErr(System.out);
so the output is in the same stream. They use two different streams so that's why you get interleaving.
For your code it would be:
long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
System.setErr(System.out);
A1.Print(50);
long endTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
System.err.print(endTime - startTime);

System.err & System.out use different buffer (dependent on OS), so these buffer might get flushed at different time. thus might give interleaving output.
And also, System.err is not guaranteed to be directed to console by default (unlike System.out), it might be linked to console or file-system.
To resolve this, you might want System.err to link to System.out
like
System.setErr(System.out);
or
System.setErr(System.console());

If you are in Eclipse it's a known bug: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=32205. Try the same from command line

You should probably be using System.err.println instead of System.err.print. It might simply be buffering until it gets an entire line.

Related

Why is a particular Guava Stopwatch.elapsed() call much later than others? (output in post)

I am working on a small game project and want to track time in order to process physics. After scrolling through different approaches, at first I had decided to use Java's Instant and Duration classes and now switched over to Guava's Stopwatch implementation, however, in my snippet, both of those approaches have a big gap at the second call of runtime.elapsed(). That doesn't seem like a big problem in the long run, but why does that happen?
I have tried running the code below as both in focus and as a Thread, in Windows and in Linux (Ubuntu 18.04) and the result stays the same - the exact values differ, but the gap occurs. I am using the IntelliJ IDEA environment with JDK 11.
Snippet from Main:
public static void main(String[] args) {
MassObject[] planets = {
new Spaceship(10, 0, 6378000)
};
planets[0].run();
}
This is part of my class MassObject extends Thread:
public void run() {
// I am using StringBuilder to eliminate flushing delays.
StringBuilder output = new StringBuilder();
Stopwatch runtime = Stopwatch.createStarted();
// massObjectList = static List<MassObject>;
for (MassObject b : massObjectList) {
if(b!=this) calculateGravity(this, b);
}
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
output.append(runtime.elapsed().getNano()).append("\n");
}
System.out.println(output);
}
Stdout:
30700
1807000
1808900
1811600
1812400
1813300
1830200
1833200
1834500
1835500
Thanks for your help.
You're calling Duration.getNano() on the Duration returned by elapsed(), which isn't what you want.
The internal representation of a Duration is a number of seconds plus a nano offset for whatever additional fraction of a whole second there is in the duration. Duration.getNano() returns that nano offset, and should almost never be called unless you're also calling Duration.getSeconds().
The method you probably want to be calling is toNanos(), which converts the whole duration to a number of nanoseconds.
Edit: In this case that doesn't explain what you're seeing because it does appear that the nano offsets being printed are probably all within the same second, but it's still the case that you shouldn't be using getNano().
The actual issue is probably some combination of classloading or extra work that has to happen during the first call, and/or JIT improving performance of future calls (though I don't think looping 10 times is necessarily enough that you'd see much of any change from JIT).

Java - repeatedly run a function in a given number of milliseconds accurately?

Does anyone have a Fairly effective way of running a function repetitively in a precise and accurate number of milliseconds. I have tried to accomplish this by using the code below to try to run a function called wave() once a second for 30 seconds:
startTime = System.nanoTime();
wholeTime = System.nanoTime();
while (loop) {
if (startTime >= time2) {
startTime = System.nanoTime();
wave();
sec++;
}
if (sec == 30) {
loop = false;
endTime = System.nanoTime();
System.out.println(wholeTime - System.nanoTime());
}
}
}
This code did not work and am wondering why this code didn't work and if their is a better approach to the problem. Any ideas on how to improve fix the above code or other successful ways of accomplishing the problem are all welcome. Thank you for your help!
more simple:
long start=System.currentTimeMillis(); // Not very very accurate
while (System.currentTimeMillis()-start<30000)
{
wave();
// count something
}
You can use a Timer+TimerTask: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/Timer.html
https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/TimerTask.html
http://bioportal.weizmann.ac.il/course/prog2/tutorial/essential/threads/timer.html
You may use Thread.sleep():
public static void main (String[] args) throws InterruptedException {
int count = 30;
long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
for(int i=0; i<count; i++) {
wave();
// how many milliseconds till the end of the second?
long sleep = start+(i+1)*1000-System.currentTimeMillis();
if(sleep > 0) // condition might be false if wave() runs longer than second
Thread.sleep(sleep);
}
}
Does anyone have a Fairly effective way of running a function repetitively in a precise and accurate number of milliseconds.
There is no way to do this kind of thing reliably and accurately in standard Java. The problem is that there is no way that you can guarantee that your thread will run when you want ti to run. For example:
your thread could be suspended to allow the GC to run
your thread could be preempted to allow another thread in your application to run
your thread could be suspended by the OS while it fetches pages by the JVM back from disk.
You can only get reliable behavior for this kind of code if you run on a hard realtime OS, and an realtime Java.
Note that this is not an issue with clock accuracy. The real problem is that the scheduler does not give you the kind of guarantees you need. For instance, none of the "sleep until X" functionality in a JVM can guarantee that your thread will wake up at time X exactly ... for any useful meaning of "exactly".
The other answers suggest various ways to do this, but beware that they are not (and cannot be) reliable and accurate in all circumstances .. or even on a typical machine running other things as well as your application.

execution of task in java within specified time

I want to execute few lines of code with 5ms in Java. Below is the snippet of my code:
public void delay(ArrayList<Double> delay_array, int counter_main) {
long start=System.currentTimeMillis();
ArrayList<Double> delay5msecs=new ArrayList<Double>();
int index1=0, i1=0;
while(System.currentTimeMillis() - start <= 5)
{
delay5msecs.add(i1,null);
//System.out.println("time");
i1++;
}
for(int i=0;i<counter_main-1;i++) {
if(delay5msecs.get(i)!=null) {
double x1=delay_array.get(i-index1);
delay5msecs.add(i,x1);
//System.out.println(i);
} else {
index1++;
System.out.println("index is :"+index1);
}
}
}
Now the problem is that the entire array is getting filled with null values and I am getting some exceptions related to index as well. Basically, I want to fill my array list with 0 till 5ms and post that fill the data from another array list in it. I've not done coding since a long time. Appreciate your help.
Thank You.
System.currentTimeMillis() will probably not have the resolution you need for 5ms. The granularity on Windows may not be better than 15ms anyway, so your code will be very platform sensitive, and may actually not do what you want.
The resolution you need might be doable with System.nanoTime() but, again, there are platform limitations you might have to research. I recall that you can't just scale the value you get and have it work everywhere.
If you can guarantee no other threads running this code, then I suppose a naive loop and fill will work, without having to implement a worker thread that waits for the filler thread to finish.
You should try to use the Collection utilities and for-each loops instead of doing all this index math in the second part.
I suppose I should also warn you that nothing in a regular JVM is guaranteed to be real-time. So if you need a hard, dependable, reproducible 5ms you might be out of luck.

Java: Why is calling a method for the first time slower?

Recently, I was writing a plugin using Java and found that retrieving an element(using get()) from a HashMap for the first time is very slow. Originally, I wanted to ask a question on that and found this (No answers though). With further experiments, however, I notice that this phenomenon happens on ArrayList and then all the methods.
Here is the code:
public class Test {
public static void main(String[] args) {
long startTime, stopTime;
// Method 1
System.out.println("Test 1:");
for (int i = 0; i < 20; ++i) {
startTime = System.nanoTime();
testMethod1();
stopTime = System.nanoTime();
System.out.println((stopTime - startTime) + "ns");
}
// Method 2
System.out.println("Test 2:");
for (int i = 0; i < 20; ++i) {
startTime = System.nanoTime();
testMethod2();
stopTime = System.nanoTime();
System.out.println((stopTime - startTime) + "ns");
}
}
public static void testMethod1() {
// Do nothing
}
public static void testMethod2() {
// Do nothing
}
}
Snippet: Test Snippet
The output would be like this:
Test 1:
2485ns
505ns
453ns
603ns
362ns
414ns
424ns
488ns
325ns
426ns
618ns
794ns
389ns
686ns
464ns
375ns
354ns
442ns
404ns
450ns
Test 2:
3248ns
700ns
538ns
531ns
351ns
444ns
321ns
424ns
523ns
488ns
487ns
491ns
551ns
497ns
480ns
465ns
477ns
453ns
727ns
504ns
I ran the code for a few times and the results are about the same. The first call would be even longer(>8000 ns) on my computer(Windows 8.1, Oracle Java 8u25).
Apparently, the first calls is usually slower than the following calls(Some calls may be longer in random cases).
Update:
I tried to learn some JMH, and write a test program
Code w/ sample output: Code
I don't know whether it's a proper benchmark(If the program has some problems, tell me), but I found that the first warm-up iterations spend more time(I use two warm-up iterations in case the warm-ups affect the results). And I think that the first warm-up should be the first call and is slower. So this phenomenon exists, if the test is proper.
So why does it happen?
You're calling System.nanoTime() inside a loop. Those calls are not free, so in addition to the time taken for an empty method you're actually measuring the time it takes to exit from nanotime call #1 and to enter nanotime call #2.
To make things worse, you're doing that on windows where nanotime performs worse compared to other platforms.
Regarding JMH: I don't think it's much help in this situation. It's designed to measure by averaging many iterations, to avoid dead code elimination, account for JIT warmup, avoid ordering dependence, ... and afaik it simply uses nanotime under the hood too.
Its design goals pretty much aim for the opposite of what you're trying to measure.
You are measuring something. But that something might be several cache misses, nanotime call overhead, some JVM internals (class loading? some kind of lazy initialization in the interpreter?), ... probably a combination thereof.
The point is that your measurement can't really be taken at face value. Even if there is a certain cost for calling a method for the first time, the time you're measuring only provides an upper bound for that.
This kind of behaviour is often caused by the compiler or RE. It starts to optimize the execution after the first iteration. Additionally class loading can have an effect (I guess this is not the case in your example code as all classes are loaded in the first loop latest).
See this thread for a similar problem.
Please keep in mind this kind of behaviour is often dependent on the environment/OS it's running on.

Time based reservoir sampling in java?

I've devised a way to do reservoir sampling in java, the code I used is here.
I've put in a huge file to be read now, and it takes about 40 seconds to read the lot before out putting the results to screen, and then reading the lot again. The file is too big to store in memory and just pick a random sample from that.
I was hoping I could write an extra while loop in there to get it to out put my reservoirList at a set period of time, and not just after it finished scanning the file.
Something like:
long startTime = System.nanoTime();
timeElapsed = 0;
while(sc.hasNext()) //avoid end of file
do{
long currentTime = System.nanoTime();
timeElapsed = (int) TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS.convert(startTime-currentTime,
TimeUnit.NANOSECONDS);
//sampling code goes here
}while(timeElapsed%5000!=0)
return reservoirList;
} return reservoirList;
But this outputs a bunch (not the full length of my ReservoirList) of lines and then a whole stream (a few hundred?) of the same line.
Is there a more elegant way to do this? One that, perhaps, works if possible.
I've cheated. For now I'm outputting every X lines read from file, where X is large enough to give me a nice time delay between each sample. I use the count from the sampling program to work out when this is.
do {
//sampling which includes a count++
}while(count%5000!=0)
One final note, I intialise counts to 1 to stop it outputting the first ten lines as a sample.
If anyone has a better, time based, solution, let me know.

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