If you’re just looking for extremely precise measurements of elapsed time, use System.nanoTime(). System.currentTimeMillis() will give you the most accurate possible elapsed time in milliseconds since the epoch, but System.nanoTime() gives you a nanosecond-precise time, relative to some arbitrary point.
From the Java Documentation:
public static long nanoTime()Returns the current value of the most precise available system timer, in nanoseconds.
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). This method provides
nanosecond precision, but not
necessarily nanosecond accuracy. No
guarantees are made about how
frequently values change. Differences
in successive calls that span greater
than approximately 292 years (263
nanoseconds) will not accurately
compute elapsed time due to numerical
overflow.
For example, to measure how long some code takes to execute:
long startTime = System.nanoTime();
// ... the code being measured ...
long estimatedTime = System.nanoTime() - startTime;
See also: JavaDoc System.nanoTime() and JavaDoc System.currentTimeMillis() for more info.