How to implement random sleep in golang

In this article, we will see how to implement the random sleep in Golang using the time and math/rand packages.

The time package in Golang has a function called the time.Sleep to pause the execution of a program for a specified duration. The time.Sleep function takes time.Duration as an argument. time.Duration tells how much time the execution of program has to be paused.

All we have to do is generating this time.Duration value randomly.

To generate the random durations in your program, you can use the math/rand package. The math/rand package provides various functions to generate random numbers, such as rand.Intn and rand.Float64.

Following is the example of how to generate a random sleep duration between 1 and 5 seconds:

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"math/rand"
	"time"
)

func main() {
	fmt.Println("Starting...")

	rand.Seed(time.Now().UnixNano())

	minSleep := 1
	maxSleep := 5
	randomSleep := rand.Intn(maxSleep-minSleep+1) + minSleep

	sleepDuration := time.Duration(randomSleep) * time.Second
	fmt.Printf("Sleeping for %d seconds\n", randomSleep)
	time.Sleep(sleepDuration)

	fmt.Println("Finished.")
}

Explanation:

In the above example, we first seed the random number generator with the current time using rand.Seed(time.Now().UnixNano()). This ensures that the random number generator produces different sequences of numbers each time the program runs. We then use rand.Intn to generate a random sleep duration between 1 and 5 seconds. We then convert the random sleep duration to a time.Duration value and use the time.Sleep function to pause the execution of the program for the random sleep duration.