Make a Thread to get sleep for a time that has decimals

Question

I need a Thread to get sleep for a time that has decimals, for example 3,5 miliseconds but is not possible because the Thread.sleep() admits only long. Is not other way to do it?
Thanks

Answer 1

dannyyates wrote:
Well, there's sleep(long millis, int nanos), but to be honest if you're requirements are that tight, sleep() is probably not the right tool for you because if doesn't really guarantee any level of accuracy.That's true, the accuracy of sleep() depends rather on the underlying OS and hardware. As the docs say:
"Causes the currently executing thread to sleep (temporarily cease execution) for the specified number of milliseconds, *subject to the precision and accuracy of system timers and schedulers*. "
Just run this simple test program, it gives interesting results:
     long start, stop;
     for (int i=0; i<100; i++) {
          start = System.nanoTime();
          try {
               Thread.sleep(5);
          } catch (InterruptedException e) {
               e.printStackTrace();
          stop = System.nanoTime();
          System.out.println("The thread slept for " + (stop-start)/1000000.0 + " ms");               
     }On my Windows XP with dual core CPU I get:
The thread slept for 5.801576 ms
The thread slept for 5.778108 ms
The thread slept for 6.134019 ms
The thread slept for 5.437562 ms
The thread slept for 6.064458 ms
The thread slept for 5.674744 ms
The thread slept for 15.354466 ms
The thread slept for 5.869461 ms
The thread slept for 5.785372 ms
The thread slept for 5.804649 ms
If you really need a precise timer you need either a real-time OS or a different solution, the method sleep(millis, nanos) will solve the problem without proper OS/hardware