TimeUnit (Java Platform SE 8 ) (original) (raw)

A TimeUnit represents time durations at a given unit of granularity and provides utility methods to convert across units, and to perform timing and delay operations in these units. ATimeUnit does not maintain time information, but only helps organize and use time representations that may be maintained separately across various contexts. A nanosecond is defined as one thousandth of a microsecond, a microsecond as one thousandth of a millisecond, a millisecond as one thousandth of a second, a minute as sixty seconds, an hour as sixty minutes, and a day as twenty four hours.

A TimeUnit is mainly used to inform time-based methods how a given timing parameter should be interpreted. For example, the following code will timeout in 50 milliseconds if the lock is not available:

Lock lock = ...; if (lock.tryLock(50L, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS)) ...

while this code will timeout in 50 seconds:

Lock lock = ...; if (lock.tryLock(50L, TimeUnit.SECONDS)) ...

Note however, that there is no guarantee that a particular timeout implementation will be able to notice the passage of time at the same granularity as the given TimeUnit.