How to get a microtime in Node.js?

Question

How can I get the most accurate time stamp in Node.js?

ps My version of Node.js is 0.8.X and the node-microtime extension doesn\'t work for me (crash on install)

Answer 1

I'm not so proud about this solution but you can have timestamp in microsecond or nanosecond in this way:

const microsecond = () => Number(Date.now() + String(process.hrtime()[1]).slice(3,6))
const nanosecond = () => Number(Date.now() + String(process.hrtime()[1]).slice(3))

// usage
microsecond() // return 1586878008997591
nanosecond()  // return 1586878009000645600

// Benchmark with 100 000 iterations
// Date.now: 7.758ms
// microsecond: 33.382ms
// nanosecond: 31.252ms

Know that:

• This solution works exclusively with node.js,
• This is about 3 to 10 times slower than Date.now()
• Weirdly, it seems very accurate, hrTime seems to follow exactly js timestamp ticks.
• You can replace Date.now() by Number(new Date()) to get timestamp in milliseconds

Edit:

Here a solution to have microsecond with comma, however, the number version will be rounded natively by javascript. So if you want the same format every time, you should use the String version of it.

const microsecondWithCommaString = () => (Date.now() + '.' + String(process.hrtime()[1]).slice(3,7))
const microsecondWithComma = () => Number(Date.now() + '.' + String(process.hrtime()[1]).slice(3,7))

microsecondWithCommaString() // return "1586883629984.8997"
microsecondWithComma() // return 1586883629985.966