How to time an operation in milliseconds in Ruby?

Question

I'm wishing to figure out how many milliseconds a particular function uses. So I looked high and low, but could not find a way to get the time in Ruby with millisecond precision.

How do you do this? In most programming languages its just something like

start = now.milliseconds
myfunction()
end = now.milliseconds
time = end - start

Answer 1

You can use ruby's Time class. For example:

t1 = Time.now
# processing...
t2 = Time.now
delta = t2 - t1 # in seconds

Now, delta is a float object and you can get as fine grain a result as the class will provide.

Answer 2

You can also use the built-in Benchmark.measure function:

require "benchmark"
puts(Benchmark.measure { sleep 0.5 })

Prints:

0.000000   0.000000   0.000000 (  0.501134)

Answer 3

Using Time.now (which returns the wall-clock time) as base-lines has a couple of issues which can result in unexpected behavior. This is caused by the fact that the wallclock time is subject to changes like inserted leap-seconds or time slewing to adjust the local time to a reference time.

If there is e.g. a leap second inserted during measurement, it will be off by a second. Similarly, depending on local system conditions, you might have to deal with daylight-saving-times, quicker or slower running clocks, or the clock even jumping back in time, resulting in a negative duration, and many other issues.

A solution to this issue is to use a different time of clock: a monotonic clock. This type of clock has different properties than the wall clock. It increments monitonically, i.e. never goes back and increases at a constant rate. With that, it does not represent the wall-clock (i.e. the time you read from a clock on your wall) but a timestamp you can compare with a later timestamp to get a difference.

In Ruby, you can use such a timestamp with Process.clock_gettime(Process::CLOCK_MONOTONIC) like follows:

t1 = Process.clock_gettime(Process::CLOCK_MONOTONIC)
# => 63988.576809828

sleep 1.5 # do some work

t2 = Process.clock_gettime(Process::CLOCK_MONOTONIC)
# => 63990.08359163

delta = t2 - t1
# => 1.5067818019961123
delta_in_milliseconds = delta * 1000
# => 1506.7818019961123

The Process.clock_gettime method returns a timestamp as a float with fractional seconds. The actual number returned has no defined meaning (that you should rely on). However, you can be sure that the next call will return a larger number and by comparing the values, you can get the real time difference.

These attributes make the method a prime candidate for measuring time differences without seeing your program fail in the least opportune times (e.g. at midnight at New Year's Eve when there is another leap-second inserted).

The Process::CLOCK_MONOTONIC constant used here is available on all modern Linux, BSD, and macOS systems as well as the Linux Subsystem for Windows. It is however not yet available for "raw" Windows systems. There, you can use the GetTickCount64 system call instead of Process.clock_gettime which also returns a timer value in millisecond granularity on Windows (>= Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008).

With Ruby, you can call this function like this:

require 'fiddle'

# Get a reference to the function once
GetTickCount64 = Fiddle::Function.new(
  Fiddle.dlopen('kernel32.dll')['GetTickCount64'],
  [],
  -Fiddle::TYPE_LONG_LONG # unsigned long long
)

timestamp = GetTickCount64.call / 1000.0
# => 63988.576809828