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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-09T15:07:10+00:00

I made a goog.Timer object ( http://closure-library.googlecode.com/svn/docs/class_goog_Timer.html ) with new goog.Timer(1) to run a

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I made a goog.Timer object (http://closure-library.googlecode.com/svn/docs/class_goog_Timer.html) with new goog.Timer(1) to run a function every millisecond via listening to the tick event. However, the function seemed to be running every 100 milliseconds instead.

I hypothesized that my function was taking a while to run (and javascript is single-threaded of course), so it took a while to get to the next round. Hence, I set the interval for the timer to 100, and it reliably ran every 1/10 of a second.

Does The Google Closure library have a more reliable timer that only runs a function precisely at the interval? If there is not enough time to run a function in one cycle, I am fine with canceling the previous call and running it the next time a tick is dispatched.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Nicholas Zakas wrote up a nice summary of Timer resolution in browsers on his blog. As Nicholas pointed out, the HTML5 timers specification (as of August 2, 2012) dictates that the minimum interval for setTimeout() and setInterval() is 4 milliseconds.

    I wrote the following demo application to test the minimum interval delay for goog.Timer. 

    <!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
  <title>goog.Timer Test</title>
  <script src="../closure-library/closure/goog/base.js"></script>
</head>
<body>

<h1>goog.Timer Test</h1>

<div id="mainContent"></div>

<script>
  goog.require('goog.Timer');
</script>
<script>
  var tickCount = 0;
  var timer = new goog.Timer(1);
  var mainDiv = document.querySelector('#mainContent');

  /**
   * Tick callback.
   */
  var tickCounter = function() {
    tickCount++;
    if (tickCount % 1000 === 0) {
      var timeElapsed = goog.now() - startTime;
      mainDiv.innerHTML = 'goog.Timer tick events: ' + tickCount +
          '<br>actual elapsed milliseconds: ' + timeElapsed +
          '<br>milliseconds per goog.Timer tick: ' + timeElapsed/tickCount;
    }
  };

  startTime = goog.now();
  timer.start();
  goog.events.listen(timer, goog.Timer.TICK, tickCounter);
</script>
</body>
</html>

    Running this program in Chrome version 21 consistently shows approximately 4.2 milliseconds per goog.Timer tick event, which is very close to the minimum allowable browser timer resolution of 4 milliseconds.

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