How do I get elapsed time in milliseconds in Ruby?

You can add a little syntax sugar to the above solution with the following:

class Time
  def to_ms
    (self.to_f * 1000.0).to_i
  end
end

start_time = Time.now
sleep(3)
end_time = Time.now
elapsed_time = end_time.to_ms - start_time.to_ms  # => 3004

As stated already, you can operate on Time objects as if they were numeric (or floating point) values. These operations result in second resolution which can easily be converted.

For example:

def time_diff_milli(start, finish)
   (finish - start) * 1000.0
end

t1 = Time.now
# arbitrary elapsed time
t2 = Time.now

msecs = time_diff_milli t1, t2

You will need to decide whether to truncate that or not.