Ever wonder what your computer actually sees when you ask it for the time? It’s not "January 15, 3:15 PM." Honestly, to a machine, that’s just a bunch of messy strings. Instead, deep in the guts of the operating system, everything is basically just a giant, ticking number.
If you’re looking for the time in ms now, you’re looking for a timestamp. This is usually the number of milliseconds that have ticked by since midnight on January 1, 1970. This moment is called the Unix Epoch. It sounds like some weird cult event, but it's just the arbitrary "Day Zero" chosen by the people who built Unix back in the day.
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Right now, that number is likely somewhere around 1,736,954,261,000 (depending on exactly when you refreshed this page).
Why milliseconds actually matter
You might think a millisecond—one-thousandth of a second—is too small to care about. You’d be wrong. In the world of tech, a millisecond is an eternity.
Take high-frequency trading. If a firm’s server gets a price update 5ms faster than the competition, they make millions. If they're 5ms late, they lose. It’s that brutal. Or look at gaming. If you’re playing an FPS and your "ping" (the time in ms it takes for your data to hit the server and come back) jumps from 20ms to 100ms, you’re basically a sitting duck. You’ll see yourself getting shot by a guy who hasn't even turned the corner yet on your screen.
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But for most of us, time in ms now is something we use for "benchmarking." Developers use it to see if their code is slow. You grab the time, run a function, grab the time again, and subtract.
How to get the time in ms now right this second
If you're a dev or just curious, here is how you actually pull this number in various environments. No fancy tools needed, just a terminal or a browser console.
- JavaScript: Just type
Date.now()in your browser console. It’s the most common way to do it. If you need super high precision for performance testing, useperformance.now(). That one gives you sub-millisecond accuracy, which is kinda overkill for most things but great for seeing if a loop is dragging. - Python: You’ll want to import the
timemodule and usetime.time() * 1000. Python usually gives you seconds as a float, so the math is on you. - Linux/Terminal: Type
date +%s%3N. The%sis seconds, and the%3Nadds those three digits of millisecond goodness. - Excel: Honestly, Excel is a nightmare for this. It stores time as a fraction of a day. To get something close to a Unix timestamp, you have to use a complex formula like
=(A1-DATE(1970,1,1))*86400000. Just... don't do it if you can avoid it.
The "Leap Second" problem nobody talks about
Here is where things get weird. Most people assume time is a straight line. It isn't. The Earth's rotation is actually slowing down slightly, mostly because of the moon's gravity acting on our oceans. To keep our clocks synced with the sun, scientists occasionally add a "leap second."
This creates a massive headache for computers. Unix time—that time in ms now you’re looking for—traditionally doesn't "know" about leap seconds. Every day is supposed to have exactly 86,400 seconds. When a leap second happens, some systems just repeat the same second twice. Others "smear" the second, slowing down the clock for a few hours so it stays in sync without jumping. Google famously does this "smearing" because if a clock suddenly jumps backward or stays still for a second, it can crash databases that expect time to only move forward.
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Precision vs. Accuracy: The big trap
People use these terms interchangeably, but they are totally different.
Precision is how many digits you have. If your clock says it’s 1:00:00.123456789, that’s high precision.
Accuracy is how close that number is to the actual, real-world time.
Your computer clock is likely "drifting" right now. Even the best consumer hardware has a crystal oscillator that isn't perfect. It might lose a few milliseconds every day. To fix this, your computer uses NTP (Network Time Protocol) to check in with an atomic clock somewhere else. If your internet is laggy, your time in ms now might be "precise" to the millisecond but "inaccurate" by a whole second.
Why does this matter for you?
If you're building an app where two people need to agree on when something happened (like a bidding war on eBay or a crypto trade), you can't trust the user's local "time in ms now." They can change their system clock to whatever they want. Always use server-side time.
How to use this today
If you’re trying to optimize a website or just understand why your computer is acting up, start measuring.
- Check your Latency: Go to your terminal and type
ping google.com. Look at the time in ms. Anything under 30ms is great. Over 100ms? You’ll feel the lag. - Audit your JS: If your site feels slow, open the DevTools (F12), go to the Console, and wrap your main function in a
console.time('test')andconsole.timeEnd('test'). It uses that time in ms now logic to tell you exactly where the bottleneck is. - Sync your gear: If you're a gamer or a musician, make sure your system is syncing with a reliable NTP server like
pool.ntp.org. It prevents "clock drift" from ruining your session.
Time isn't just a label; it's a coordinate. And when you're working in milliseconds, you're looking at the very fabric of how modern tech stays glued together.
Actionable Next Steps:
To see your own system's drift, compare your local clock to a primary reference. You can do this by visiting time.is in your browser. It will calculate the offset between your system's time in ms now and the atomic clock standard, showing you exactly how many milliseconds you are ahead or behind. For developers, replace Date.now() with performance.now() in your next profiling session to avoid errors caused by system clock adjustments during execution.