Simple java code measuring

I am trying to simply measure my code execution time.

public class PerfMeasureUtil {

    private static final Logger LOG = Logger.getLogger(PerfMeasureUtil.class.getName());
    private long startTime;
    private long duration;
    private static final EnvironmentProperties env = new EnvironmentProperties();

    /**
     * start counting the time
     *
     * @return self
     */
    public PerfMeasureUtil start() {
        if (env.isDev()) {// || env.isTest()) {
            LOG.log(Level.INFO, "====================================== measurement starts");
            this.startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
        }
        return this;
    }

    /**
     * stops counting the time and returns the result
     *
     * @param methodName
     * @return
     */
    public long stop(String methodName) {
        if (env.isDev()) {// || env.isTest()) {
            this.duration = System.currentTimeMillis() - startTime;
            LOG.log(Level.INFO, "====================================== {0}", methodName);
            LOG.log(Level.INFO, "time spend: {0}ms", duration);
            LOG.log(Level.INFO, "======================================");
            return duration;
        }
        return -1;
    }
}

EnvironmentProperties has a boolean property based on the Maven build type. The measurement should be executed only on dev, or maybe testing environment, not in production. Now I call it like this everywhere, where it is needed:

PerfMeasureUtil measureUtil = new PerfMeasureUtil().start();
    foo = readFooFromSomewhere();
    bar.applyFoo();
    printResult(bar);
    measureUtil.stop("FooBarApplication.aplyFooOnBar");

Is there something that could be made clearly better? I am not sure about the permanent if-check even on other built types when it is not needed.

And of course the pollution of code is pretty bad with it, but this way I have more control on the code amount measured. Maybe annotation could help?

Return Value

I don't think it's a good idea to return PerfMeasureUtil in start. What would it even be used for? The code would look like this, which doesn't make much sense:

PerfMeasureUtil meassure = new PerfMeasureUtil();
meassure = meassure.start();
int time = meassure.stop("someName");

I could imagine using it as sort of a factory method:

public static PerfMeasureUtil start() {
    PerfMeasureUtil meassure = new PerfMeasureUtil();
    if (env.isDev()) {// || env.isTest()) {
        LOG.log(Level.INFO, "====================================== measurement starts");
        meassure.setStartTime(System.currentTimeMillis());
    }
    return meassure;
}

And then use it like this:

PerfMeasureUtil meassure = PerfMeasureUtil.start();
int time = meassure.stop("someName");

But I would probably prefer to just not return anything.

Dev check

If you want to reduce the amount of environment checks, you could actually use the factory approach from above, and check on object creation if you are in development mode. If not, return a dummy object whose methods do nothing.

Misc

• be consistent with your use of this. Currently, you use it sometimes, but not always.

• duration doesn't really need to be a field.

• I would add a comment on stop to mention what methodName does (that it's only used for logging).

StackExchange Code Review Q#85161, answer score: 3