Easily measure elapsed time

Question

I am trying to use time() to measure various points of my program.

What I don't understand is why the values in the before and after are the same? I understand this is not the best way to profile my program, I just want to see how long something take.

printf("**MyProgram::before time= %ld\n", time(NULL));

doSomthing();
doSomthingLong();

printf("**MyProgram::after time= %ld\n", time(NULL));

I have tried:

struct timeval diff, startTV, endTV;

gettimeofday(&startTV, NULL); 

doSomething();
doSomethingLong();

gettimeofday(&endTV, NULL); 

timersub(&endTV, &startTV, &diff);

printf("**time taken = %ld %ld\n", diff.tv_sec, diff.tv_usec);

How do I read a result of **time taken = 0 26339? Does that mean 26,339 nanoseconds = 26.3 msec?

What about **time taken = 4 45025, does that mean 4 seconds and 25 msec?

Answer 1

the time(NULL) function will return the number of seconds elapsed since 01/01/1970 at 00:00. And because, that function is called at different time in your program, it will always be different Time in C++

Answer 2

Internally the function will access the system's clock, which is why it returns different values each time you call it. In general with non-functional languages there can be many side effects and hidden state in functions which you can't see just by looking at the function's name and arguments.

Answer 3

time(NULL) returns the number of seconds elapsed since 01/01/1970 at 00:00 (the Epoch). So the difference between the two values is the number of seconds your processing took.

int t0 = time(NULL);
doSomthing();
doSomthingLong();
int t1 = time(NULL);

printf ("time = %d secs\n", t1 - t0);

You can get finer results with getttimeofday(), which return the current time in seconds, as time() does and also in microseconds.

Answer 4

You can use GetTickCount() to get the number of milliseconds that have elapsed since the system was started.

long int before = GetTickCount();

// Perform time-consuming operation

long int after = GetTickCount();

Answer 5

They are they same because your doSomething function happens faster than the granularity of the timer. Try:

printf ("**MyProgram::before time= %ld\n", time(NULL));

for(i = 0; i < 1000; ++i) {
    doSomthing();
    doSomthingLong();
}

printf ("**MyProgram::after time= %ld\n", time(NULL));

Answer 6

The time(NULL) function call will return the number of seconds elapsed since epoc: January 1 1970. Perhaps what you mean to do is take the difference between two timestamps:

size_t start = time(NULL);
doSomthing();
doSomthingLong();

printf ("**MyProgram::time elapsed= %lds\n", time(NULL) - start);

Answer 7

#include <ctime>

void f() {
  using namespace std;
  clock_t begin = clock();

  code_to_time();

  clock_t end = clock();
  double elapsed_secs = double(end - begin) / CLOCKS_PER_SEC;
}

The time() function is only accurate to within a second, but there are CLOCKS_PER_SEC "clocks" within a second. This is an easy, portable measurement, even though it's over-simplified.

Answer 8

The reason both values are the same is because your long procedure doesn't take that long - less than one second. You can try just adding a long loop (for (int i = 0; i < 100000000; i++) ; ) at the end of the function to make sure this is the issue, then we can go from there...

In case the above turns out to be true, you will need to find a different system function (I understand you work on linux, so I can't help you with the function name) to measure time more accurately. I am sure there is a function simular to GetTickCount() in linux, you just need to find it.

Answer 9

The values printed by your program are seconds, and microseconds.

0 26339 = 0.026'339 s =   26339 µs
4 45025 = 0.045'025 s = 4045025 µs

Answer 10

As I can see from your question, it looks like you want to know the elapsed time after execution of some piece of code. I guess you would be comfortable to see the results in second(s). If so, try using difftime() function as shown below. Hope this solves your problem.

#include <time.h>
time_t start,end;
time (&start);
.
.
.
<your code>
.
.
.
time (&end);
double dif = difftime (end,start);
printf ("Elasped time is %.2lf seconds.", dif );

Answer 11

Please check this thread

http://www.unix.com/programming/81639-rdtsc-use-c.html