Ever hit performance bottlenecks with Time.now? Willing to deal with the fuzziness of gettimeofday? Well then this gem is for you!
Very useful if what you want to do is compare times for things like cache invalidation where you don't mind a little jitter than gettimeofday can introduce.
1.9.3p374 :007 > puts Time.now.to_i.to_s + " " + gettimeofday.to_s
1372267854 1372267854
1.9.3p374 :008 > puts Benchmark.measure{for i in 1..1_000_000; Time.now < Time.now; end }
1.030000 0.040000 1.070000 ( 1.073589)
1.9.3p374 :009 > puts Benchmark.measure{for i in 1..1_000_000; gettimeofday < gettimeofday; end }
0.160000 0.000000 0.160000 ( 0.168349)
Seconds since epoch in ruby never happened so fast!
1.9.3p374 :001 > require 'fasttime'
1.9.3p374 :002 > require 'benchmark'
1.9.3p374 :003 > include FastTime
1.9.3p374 :004 > puts Benchmark.measure{for i in 1..1_000_000; Time.now.to_i; end }
0.700000 0.000000 0.700000 ( 0.704198)
1.9.3p374 :005 > puts Benchmark.measure{for i in 1..1_000_000; gettimeofday; end }
0.100000 0.000000 0.100000 ( 0.100086)
1.9.3p374 :006 > puts Benchmark.measure{for i in 1..1_000_000; nil; end }
0.050000 0.000000 0.050000 ( 0.051070)
For more info see: http://linux.die.net/man/2/gettimeofday
Impl notes: time_t is cast to a (long int) in case it isnt already, so YMMV on speed if you are running a 32 bit ruby and Fixnum has to be promoted to a Bignum to store the long int.
When I wrote this library, I was unaware of any alternatives. Since that time, I have found one that uses the monotonic clock instead of gettimeofday: https://github.com/bwbuchanan/absolute_time