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Analyzing CPU time

You're optimizing a financial analysis application that performs calculations. To get a precise understanding of processor usage, you need to implement a utility that measures the exact CPU time consumed by different operations, which will help you identify which calculations are truly CPU-intensive.

This exercise is part of the course

Optimizing Code in Java

View Course

Exercise instructions

  • Retrieve the ThreadMXBean instance from the ManagementFactory class.
  • Get the CPU time for the current thread.

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

import java.lang.management.*

public class Main {
    public static long getCpuTimeNano() {
        // Retrieve the ThreadMXBean instance
        ThreadMXBean threadMXBean = ____
        if (threadMXBean.isThreadCpuTimeSupported()) {
            threadMXBean.setThreadCpuTimeEnabled(true);
            // Return the current thread CPU time
            return ____(Thread.currentThread().threadId());
        } else {
            System.out.println("CPU time measurement not supported");
            return 0;
        }
    }
    
    public static long calculateSum(long n) {
        long sum = 0;
        for (long i = 1; i <= n; i++) {
            sum += i;
        }
        return sum;
    }
    
    public static long calculateSquareSum(long n) {
        long sum = 0;
        for (long i = 1; i <= n; i++) {
            sum += i * i;
        }
        return sum;
    }
    
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        long n = 100_000_000; // 100 million
        long startSum = getCpuTimeNano();
        long sum = calculateSum(n);
        long endSum = getCpuTimeNano();
        System.out.println("CPU time for sum: " + 
                          ((endSum - startSum) / 1_000_000.0) + " ms");
        long startSquareSum = getCpuTimeNano();
        long squareSum = calculateSquareSum(n);
        long endSquareSum = getCpuTimeNano();
        System.out.println("CPU time for square sum: " + 
                          ((endSquareSum - startSquareSum) / 1_000_000.0) + " ms");
        double ratio = (endSquareSum - startSquareSum) / (double)(endSum - startSum);
        System.out.println("Square sum takes " + ratio + 
                          " times more CPU time than regular sum");
    }
}
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