How to Calculate Execution Time of a Code Snippet

Question

I have to compute execution time of a C++ code snippet in seconds. It must be working either on Windows or Unix machines.

I use code the following code to do this. (import before)

clock_t startTime = clock();
// some code here
// to compute its execution duration in runtime
cout << double( clock() - startTime ) / (double)CLOCKS_PER_SEC<< " seconds." << endl;

However for small inputs or short statements such as a = a + 1, I get "0 seconds" result. I think it must be something like 0.0000001 seconds or something like that.

I remember that System.nanoTime() in Java works pretty well in this case. However I can't get same exact functionality from clock() function of C++.

Do you have a solution?

Answer 1

I suggest using the standard library functions for obtaining time information from the system.

If you want finer resolution, perform more execution iterations. Instead of running the program once and obtaining samples, run it 1000 times or more.

Answer 2

You can use this function I wrote. You call GetTimeMs64(), and it returns the number of milliseconds elapsed since the unix epoch using the system clock - the just like time(NULL), except in milliseconds.

It works on both windows and linux; it is thread safe.

Note that the granularity is 15 ms on windows; on linux it is implementation dependent, but it usually 15 ms as well.

#ifdef _WIN32
#include <Windows.h>
#else
#include <sys/time.h>
#include <ctime>
#endif

/* Remove if already defined */
typedef long long int64; typedef unsigned long long uint64;

/* Returns the amount of milliseconds elapsed since the UNIX epoch. Works on both
 * windows and linux. */

uint64 GetTimeMs64()
{
#ifdef _WIN32
 /* Windows */
 FILETIME ft;
 LARGE_INTEGER li;

 /* Get the amount of 100 nano seconds intervals elapsed since January 1, 1601 (UTC) and copy it
  * to a LARGE_INTEGER structure. */
 GetSystemTimeAsFileTime(&ft);
 li.LowPart = ft.dwLowDateTime;
 li.HighPart = ft.dwHighDateTime;

 uint64 ret = li.QuadPart;
 ret -= 116444736000000000LL; /* Convert from file time to UNIX epoch time. */
 ret /= 10000; /* From 100 nano seconds (10^-7) to 1 millisecond (10^-3) intervals */

 return ret;
#else
 /* Linux */
 struct timeval tv;

 gettimeofday(&tv, NULL);

 uint64 ret = tv.tv_usec;
 /* Convert from micro seconds (10^-6) to milliseconds (10^-3) */
 ret /= 1000;

 /* Adds the seconds (10^0) after converting them to milliseconds (10^-3) */
 ret += (tv.tv_sec * 1000);

 return ret;
#endif
}

Answer 3

You could also look at the [cxx-rtimers][1] on GitHub, which provide some header-only routines for gathering statistics on the run-time of any code-block where you can create a local variable. Those timers have versions that use std::chrono on C++11, or timers from the Boost library, or standard POSIX timer functions. These timers will report the average, maximum & minimum duration spent within a function, as well as the number of times it is called. They can be used as simply as follows:

#include <rtimers/cxx11.hpp>

void expensiveFunction() {
    static rtimers::cxx11::DefaultTimer timer("expensive");
    auto scopedStartStop = timer.scopedStart();
    // Do something costly...
}

Answer 4

just a simple class that benchmark the codeblock :

using namespace std::chrono;

class benchmark {
  public:
  time_point<high_resolution_clock>  t0, t1;
  unsigned int *d;
  benchmark(unsigned int *res) : d(res) { 
                 t0 = high_resolution_clock::now();
  }
  ~benchmark() { t1 = high_resolution_clock::now();
                  milliseconds dur = duration_cast<milliseconds>(t1 - t0);
                  *d = dur.count();
  }
};
// simple usage 
// unsigned int t;
// { // put the code in a block
//  benchmark bench(&t);
//  // ...
//  // code to benchmark
// }
// HERE the t contains time in milliseconds

// one way to use it can be :
#define BENCH(TITLE,CODEBLOCK) \
  unsigned int __time__##__LINE__ = 0;  \
  { benchmark bench(&__time__##__LINE__); \
      CODEBLOCK \
  } \
  printf("%s took %d ms\n",(TITLE),__time__##__LINE__);


int main(void) {
  BENCH("TITLE",{
    for(int n = 0; n < testcount; n++ )
      int a = n % 3;
  });
  return 0;
}

Answer 5

In some programs I wrote I used RDTS for such purpose. RDTSC is not about time but about number of cycles from processor start. You have to calibrate it on your system to get a result in second, but it's really handy when you want to evaluate performance, it's even better to use number of cycles directly without trying to change them back to seconds.

(link above is to a french wikipedia page, but it has C++ code samples, english version is here)

Answer 6

For cases where you want to time the same stretch of code every time it gets executed (e.g. for profiling code that you think might be a bottleneck), here is a wrapper around (a slight modification to) Andreas Bonini's function that I find useful:

#ifdef _WIN32
#include <Windows.h>
#else
#include <sys/time.h>
#endif

/*
 *  A simple timer class to see how long a piece of code takes. 
 *  Usage:
 *
 *  {
 *      static Timer timer("name");
 *
 *      ...
 *
 *      timer.start()
 *      [ The code you want timed ]
 *      timer.stop()
 *
 *      ...
 *  }
 *
 *  At the end of execution, you will get output:
 *
 *  Time for name: XXX seconds
 */
class Timer
{
public:
    Timer(std::string name, bool start_running=false) : 
        _name(name), _accum(0), _running(false)
    {
        if (start_running) start();
    }

    ~Timer() { stop(); report(); }

    void start() {
        if (!_running) {
            _start_time = GetTimeMicroseconds();
            _running = true;
        }
    }
    void stop() {
        if (_running) {
            unsigned long long stop_time = GetTimeMicroseconds();
            _accum += stop_time - _start_time;
            _running = false;
        }
    }
    void report() { 
        std::cout<<"Time for "<<_name<<": " << _accum / 1.e6 << " seconds\n"; 
    }
private:
    // cf. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1861294/how-to-calculate-execution-time-of-a-code-snippet-in-c
    unsigned long long GetTimeMicroseconds()
    {
#ifdef _WIN32
        /* Windows */
        FILETIME ft;
        LARGE_INTEGER li;

        /* Get the amount of 100 nano seconds intervals elapsed since January 1, 1601 (UTC) and copy it
         *   * to a LARGE_INTEGER structure. */
        GetSystemTimeAsFileTime(&ft);
        li.LowPart = ft.dwLowDateTime;
        li.HighPart = ft.dwHighDateTime;

        unsigned long long ret = li.QuadPart;
        ret -= 116444736000000000LL; /* Convert from file time to UNIX epoch time. */
        ret /= 10; /* From 100 nano seconds (10^-7) to 1 microsecond (10^-6) intervals */
#else
        /* Linux */
        struct timeval tv;

        gettimeofday(&tv, NULL);

        unsigned long long ret = tv.tv_usec;
        /* Adds the seconds (10^0) after converting them to microseconds (10^-6) */
        ret += (tv.tv_sec * 1000000);
#endif
        return ret;
    }
    std::string _name;
    long long _accum;
    unsigned long long _start_time;
    bool _running;
};