Execution time of C program

Question

CLOCKS_PER_SEC is a constant which is declared in <time.h>. To get the CPU time used by a task within a C application, use:

clock_t begin = clock();

/* here, do your time-consuming job */

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

Note that this returns the time as a floating point type. This can be more precise than a second (e.g. you measure 4.52 seconds). Precision depends on the architecture; on modern systems you easily get 10ms or lower, but on older Windows machines (from the Win98 era) it was closer to 60ms.

clock() is standard C; it works "everywhere". There are system-specific functions, such as getrusage() on Unix-like systems.

Java's System.currentTimeMillis() does not measure the same thing. It is a "wall clock": it can help you measure how much time it took for the program to execute, but it does not tell you how much CPU time was used. On a multitasking systems (i.e. all of them), these can be widely different.

If you are using the Unix shell for running, you can use the time command.

doing

$ time ./a.out

assuming a.out as the executable will give u the time taken to run this

In plain vanilla C:

#include <time.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
    clock_t tic = clock();

    my_expensive_function_which_can_spawn_threads();

    clock_t toc = clock();

    printf("Elapsed: %f seconds\n", (double)(toc - tic) / CLOCKS_PER_SEC);

    return 0;
}

You functionally want this:

#include <sys/time.h>

struct timeval  tv1, tv2;
gettimeofday(&tv1, NULL);
/* stuff to do! */
gettimeofday(&tv2, NULL);

printf ("Total time = %f seconds\n",
         (double) (tv2.tv_usec - tv1.tv_usec) / 1000000 +
         (double) (tv2.tv_sec - tv1.tv_sec));

Note that this measures in microseconds, not just seconds.

Most of the simple programs have computation time in milli-seconds. So, i suppose, you will find this useful.

#include <time.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main(){
    clock_t start = clock();
    // Execuatable code
    clock_t stop = clock();
    double elapsed = (double)(stop - start) * 1000.0 / CLOCKS_PER_SEC;
    printf("Time elapsed in ms: %f", elapsed);
}

If you want to compute the runtime of the entire program and you are on a Unix system, run your program using the time command like this time ./a.out