Performance.now

The performance.now() method returns a DOMHighResTimeStamp, measured in milliseconds.

The returned value represents the time elapsed since the time origin.

Bear in mind the following points:

• In dedicated workers created from a Window context, the value in the worker will be lower than performance.now() in the window who spawned that worker. It used to be the same as t0 of the main context, but this was changed.
• In shared or service workers, the value in the worker might be higher than that of the main context because that window can be created after those workers.

Syntax

t = performance.now();

Example

var t0 = performance.now();
doSomething();
var t1 = performance.now();
console.log("Call to doSomething took " + (t1 - t0) + " milliseconds.");

Unlike other timing data available to JavaScript (for example Date.now), the timestamps returned by Performance.now() are not limited to one-millisecond resolution. Instead, they represent times as floating-point numbers with up to microsecond precision.

Also unlike Date.now(), the values returned by Performance.now() always increase at a constant rate, independent of the system clock (which might be adjusted manually or skewed by software like NTP). Otherwise, performance.timing.navigationStart + performance.now() will be approximately equal to Date.now().

Reduced time precision

To offer protection against timing attacks and fingerprinting, the precision of performance.now() might get rounded depending on browser settings.
In Firefox, the privacy.reduceTimerPrecision preference is enabled by default and defaults to 1ms.

// reduced time precision (1ms) in Firefox 60
performance.now();
// 8781416
// 8781815
// 8782206
// ...


// reduced time precision with `privacy.resistFingerprinting` enabled
performance.now();
// 8865400
// 8866200
// 8866700
// ...

In Firefox, you can also enable privacy.resistFingerprinting — this changes the precision to 100ms or the value of privacy.resistFingerprinting.reduceTimerPrecision.microseconds, whichever is larger.

Specifications

Browser compatibilityUpdate compatibility data on GitHub

See also

• When milliseconds are not enough: performance.now() from HTML5 Rocks.