New -logtimerelative option to do millisec debug.log timestamps #6880

I used this with -debug=net to measure message propagation across the Internet.

To test:

bitcoind -printtoconsole -regtest -logtimerelative ... you'll get seconds.milliseconds timestamps

bitcoind -printtoconsole -regtest -logtimerelative=1445598671 ... you'll get msec timestamps relative to 2015-10-23 11:11:11 GMT

Setting the relative time is useful to directly compare debug.log timings from multiple bitcoind processes running on one machine (or from machines that have highly synchronized clocks).

Any reason not to go to microsecond precision immediately? We have GetTimeMicros, and in most places in the code use microsecond int64_t values for time already.

If you expect microsecond precision from messages in debug.log... you'll be disappointed. And I'd find it annoying to ignore the extra three essentially-random digits that microsecond timestamps would give.

You can't get microsecond precision, but you can certainly get sub-millisecond precision. So I'd also vote for microseconds. More importantly, I'd greatly prefer to just add the extra precision to the existing time stamps instead (at least as an option). Often I have no idea that I wanted to look at precise timing of something until after the fact, and I would not want to run all my debug logs with relative time all the time.

Agree with @morcos

Not important enough to me to bikeshed.