Performance Schema timers vary in precision and amount of overhead. To see what timers are available and their characteristics, check the performance_timers table:

mysql> SELECT * FROM performance_schema.performance_timers;
+-------------+-----------------+------------------+----------------+
| TIMER_NAME  | TIMER_FREQUENCY | TIMER_RESOLUTION | TIMER_OVERHEAD |
+-------------+-----------------+------------------+----------------+
| CYCLE       |      2389029850 |                1 |             72 |
| NANOSECOND  |      1000000000 |                1 |            112 |
| MICROSECOND |         1000000 |                1 |            136 |
| MILLISECOND |            1036 |                1 |            168 |
| THREAD_CPU  |       339101694 |                1 |            798 |
+-------------+-----------------+------------------+----------------+

If the values associated with a given timer name are NULL, that timer is not supported on your platform.

The columns have these meanings:

The Performance Schema assigns timers as follows:

At server startup, the Performance Schema verifies that assumptions made at build time about timer assignments are correct, and displays a warning if a timer is not available.

To time wait events, the most important criterion is to reduce overhead, at the possible expense of the timer accuracy, so using the CYCLE timer is the best.

The time a statement (or stage) takes to execute is in general orders of magnitude larger than the time it takes to execute a single wait. To time statements, the most important criterion is to have an accurate measure, which is not affected by changes in processor frequency, so using a timer which is not based on cycles is the best. The default timer for statements is NANOSECOND. The extra “overhead” compared to the CYCLE timer is not significant, because the overhead caused by calling a timer twice (once when the statement starts, once when it ends) is orders of magnitude less compared to the CPU time used to execute the statement itself. Using the CYCLE timer has no benefit here, only drawbacks.

The precision offered by the cycle counter depends on processor speed. If the processor runs at 1 GHz (one billion cycles/second) or higher, the cycle counter delivers sub-nanosecond precision. Using the cycle counter is much cheaper than getting the actual time of day. For example, the standard gettimeofday() function can take hundreds of cycles, which is an unacceptable overhead for data gathering that may occur thousands or millions of times per second.

Cycle counters also have disadvantages:

MySQL works with cycle counters on x386 (Windows, macOS, Linux, Solaris, and other Unix flavors), PowerPC, and IA-64.

Rows in Performance Schema tables that store current events and historical events have three columns to represent timing information: TIMER_START and TIMER_END indicate when an event started and finished, and TIMER_WAIT indicates event duration.

The setup_instruments table has an ENABLED column to indicate the instruments for which to collect events. The table also has a TIMED column to indicate which instruments are timed. If an instrument is not enabled, it produces no events. If an enabled instrument is not timed, events produced by the instrument have NULL for the TIMER_START, TIMER_END, and TIMER_WAIT timer values. This in turn causes those values to be ignored when calculating aggregate time values in summary tables (sum, minimum, maximum, and average).

Internally, times within events are stored in units given by the timer in effect when event timing begins. For display when events are retrieved from Performance Schema tables, times are shown in picoseconds (trillionths of a second) to normalize them to a standard unit, regardless of which timer is selected.

The timer baseline (“time zero”) occurs at Performance Schema initialization during server startup. TIMER_START and TIMER_END values in events represent picoseconds since the baseline. TIMER_WAIT values are durations in picoseconds.

Picosecond values in events are approximate. Their accuracy is subject to the usual forms of error associated with conversion from one unit to another. If the CYCLE timer is used and the processor rate varies, there might be drift. For these reasons, it is not reasonable to look at the TIMER_START value for an event as an accurate measure of time elapsed since server startup. On the other hand, it is reasonable to use TIMER_START or TIMER_WAIT values in ORDER BY clauses to order events by start time or duration.

The choice of picoseconds in events rather than a value such as microseconds has a performance basis. One implementation goal was to show results in a uniform time unit, regardless of the timer. In an ideal world this time unit would look like a wall-clock unit and be reasonably precise; in other words, microseconds. But to convert cycles or nanoseconds to microseconds, it would be necessary to perform a division for every instrumentation. Division is expensive on many platforms. Multiplication is not expensive, so that is what is used. Therefore, the time unit is an integer multiple of the highest possible TIMER_FREQUENCY value, using a multiplier large enough to ensure that there is no major precision loss. The result is that the time unit is “picoseconds.” This precision is spurious, but the decision enables overhead to be minimized.

While a wait, stage, statement, or transaction event is executing, the respective current-event tables display current-event timing information:

events_waits_current
events_stages_current
events_statements_current
events_transactions_current

To make it possible to determine how long a not-yet-completed event has been running, the timer columns are set as follows:

Events that have not yet completed have an END_EVENT_ID value of NULL. To assess time elapsed so far for an event, use the TIMER_WAIT column. Therefore, to identify events that have not yet completed and have taken longer than N picoseconds thus far, monitoring applications can use this expression in queries:

WHERE END_EVENT_ID IS NULL AND TIMER_WAIT > N

Event identification as just described assumes that the corresponding instruments have ENABLED and TIMED set to YES and that the relevant consumers are enabled.