current time from some arbitrary time base in the past , counting in milliseconds , and not affected by settimeofday or similar system clock changes . this is appropriate to use when computing how much longer to wait for an interval to expire . this function can return a negative value and it must be handled correctly by callers . see the documentation of system #nanotime for caveats . concode_field_sep long NANOSECONDS_PER_MILLISECOND concode_field_sep long now
long function ( ) { return System . nanoTime ( ) / NANOSECONDS_PER_MILLISECOND ; }