C++ , Timer, Milliseconds

Question

#include <iostream>
#include <conio.h>
#include <ctime>



using namespace std;

double diffclock(clock_t clock1,clock_t clock2)
{
    double diffticks=clock1-clock2;
    double diffms=(diffticks)/(CLOCKS_PER_SEC/1000);
    return diffms;
}
int main()
{
    clock_t start = clock();
    for(int i=0;;i++)
    {

    if(i==10000)break;
    }
    clock_t end = clock();

    cout << diffclock(start,end)<<endl;

    getch();
return 0;
}

So my problems comes to that it returns me a 0, well to be stright i want to check how much time my program does operate... I found tons of crap over the internet well mostly it comes to the same point of getting a 0 beacuse the start and the end is the same

This problems goes to C++ remeber : <

Answer 1

At a glance, it seems like you are subtracting the larger value from the smaller value. You call:

diffclock( start, end );

But then diffclock is defined as:

    double diffclock( clock_t clock1, clock_t clock2 ) {

        double diffticks = clock1 - clock2;
        double diffms    = diffticks / ( CLOCKS_PER_SEC / 1000 );

        return diffms;
    }

Apart from that, it may have something to do with the way you are converting units. The use of 1000 to convert to milliseconds is different on this page:

http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/chrono/c/clock

Answer 2

There are a few problems in here. The first is that you obviously switched start and stop time when passing to diffclock() function. The second problem is optimization. Any reasonably smart compiler with optimizations enabled would simply throw the entire loop away as it does not have any side effects. But even you fix the above problems, the program would most likely still print 0. If you try to imagine doing billions operations per second, throw sophisticated out of order execution, prediction and tons of other technologies employed by modern CPUs, even a CPU may optimize your loop away. But even if it doesn't, you'd need a lot more than 10K iterations in order to make it run longer. You'd probably need your program to run for a second or two in order to get clock() reflect anything.

But the most important problem is clock() itself. That function is not suitable for any time of performance measurements whatsoever. What it does is gives you an approximation of processor time used by the program. Aside of vague nature of the approximation method that might be used by any given implementation (since standard doesn't require it of anything specific), POSIX standard also requires CLOCKS_PER_SEC to be equal to 1000000 independent of the actual resolution. In other words — it doesn't matter how precise the clock is, it doesn't matter at what frequency your CPU is running. To put simply — it is a totally useless number and therefore a totally useless function. The only reason why it still exists is probably for historical reasons. So, please do not use it.

To achieve what you are looking for, people have used to read the CPU Time Stamp also known as "RDTSC" by the name of the corresponding CPU instruction used to read it. These days, however, this is also mostly useless because:

1. Modern operating systems can easily migrate the program from one CPU to another. You can imagine that reading time stamp on another CPU after running for a second on another doesn't make a lot of sense. It is only in latest Intel CPUs the counter is synchronized across CPU cores. All in all, it is still possible to do this, but a lot of extra care must be taken (i.e. once can setup the affinity for the process, etc. etc).
2. Measuring CPU instructions of the program oftentimes does not give an accurate picture of how much time it is actually using. This is because in real programs there could be some system calls where the work is performed by the OS kernel on behalf of the process. In that case, that time is not included.
3. It could also happen that OS suspends an execution of the process for a long time. And even though it took only a few instructions to execute, for user it seemed like a second. So such a performance measurement may be useless.

So what to do?

When it comes to profiling, a tool like perf must be used. It can track a number of CPU clocks, cache misses, branches taken, branches missed, a number of times the process was moved from one CPU to another, and so on. It can be used as a tool, or can be embedded into your application (something like PAPI).

And if the question is about actual time spent, people use a wall clock. Preferably, a high-precision one, that is also not a subject to NTP adjustments (monotonic). That shows exactly how much time elapsed, no matter what was going on. For that purpose clock_gettime() can be used. It is part of SUSv2, POSIX.1-2001 standard. Given that use you getch() to keep the terminal open, I'd assume you are using Windows. There, unfortunately, you don't have clock_gettime() and the closest thing would be performance counters API:

BOOL QueryPerformanceFrequency(LARGE_INTEGER *lpFrequency);
BOOL QueryPerformanceCounter(LARGE_INTEGER *lpPerformanceCount);

For a portable solution, the best bet is on std::chrono::high_resolution_clock(). It was introduced in C++11, but is supported by most industrial grade compilers (GCC, Clang, MSVC).

Below is an example of how to use it. Please note that since I know that my CPU will do 10000 increments of an integer way faster than a millisecond, I have changed it to microseconds. I've also declared the counter as volatile in hope that compiler won't optimize it away.

#include <ctime>
#include <chrono>
#include <iostream>

int main()
{
    volatile int i = 0; // "volatile" is to ask compiler not to optimize the loop away.
    auto start = std::chrono::steady_clock::now();
    while (i < 10000) {
        ++i;
    }
    auto end = std::chrono::steady_clock::now();
    auto elapsed = std::chrono::duration_cast<std::chrono::microseconds>(end - start);
    std::cout << "It took me " << elapsed.count() << " microseconds." << std::endl;
}

When I compile and run it, it prints:

$ g++ -std=c++11 -Wall -o test ./test.cpp && ./test
It took me 23 microseconds.

Hope it helps. Good Luck!

Answer 3

First of all you should subtract end - start not vice versa.
Documentation says if value is not available clock() returns -1, did you check that? What optimization level do you use when compile your program? If optimization is enabled compiler can effectively eliminate your loop entirely.

Answer 4

The problem appears to be the loop is just too short. I tried it on my system and it gave 0 ticks. I checked what diffticks was and it was 0. Increasing the loop size to 100000000, so there was a noticeable time lag and I got -290 as output (bug -- I think that the diffticks should be clock2-clock1 so we should get 290 and not -290). I tried also changing "1000" to "1000.0" in the division and that didn't work.

Compiling with optimization does remove the loop, so you have to not use it, or make the loop "do something", e.g. increment a counter other than the loop counter in the loop body. At least that's what GCC does.