How to subtract microtime and display date with milliseconds in php?

You need to use microtime for the start/end values, and only format it for display at the end.

// Get the start time in microseconds, as a float value$starttime = microtime(true);/************//* Do stuff *//************/// Get the difference between start and end in microseconds, as a float value$diff = microtime(true) - $starttime;// Break the difference into seconds and microseconds$sec = intval($diff);$micro = $diff - $sec;// Format the result as you want it// $final will contain something like "00:00:02.452"$final = strftime('%T', mktime(0, 0, $sec)) . str_replace('0.', '.', sprintf('%.3f', $micro));

Note: this is returning float values from microtime and using float arithmetic to simplify the math, so your numbers may be extremely slightly off due to the float rounding problem, but you are rounding the result to 3 digits in the end anyway, and minor fluctuations in processor timing are greater than floating point errors anyway, so this is not problem for you on multiple levels.

Well phpmyadmin uses this a code like this to calculate the time that a query took. It's similar to your requirements:

//time beforelist($usec, $sec) = explode(' ',microtime($starttime));$querytime_before = ((float)$usec + (float)$sec);/* your code *///time afterlist($usec, $sec) = explode(' ',microtime($endtime));$querytime_after = ((float)$usec + (float)$sec);$querytime = $querytime_after - $querytime_before;

I think this should work for you. You just have to figure your output format