time（）以及PHP如何解析脚本

Question

I put $START_TIME = time(); at the beginning of my code, and $END_TIME = time(); at the end of my code. then I did echo ($END_TIME - $START_TIME); and received a difference of ~ 4.

My question is, how inaccurate is this way of measuring parsing/processing time? and why?

edit: i took out the stupid part of my question :) the rest of the question still stands!

Answer 1

time() is giving you the seconds since the "unix big bang". What you want is microtime(true) (see documentation here) which gives you the microseconds.