Measuring code execution time

Question

A better way would be to use Stopwatch, instead of DateTime differences.

Stopwatch Class - Microsoft Docs

Provides a set of methods and properties that you can use to accurately measure elapsed time.

// create and start a Stopwatch instance
Stopwatch stopwatch = Stopwatch.StartNew(); 

// replace with your sample code:
System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(500);

stopwatch.Stop();
Console.WriteLine(stopwatch.ElapsedMilliseconds);

Stopwatch measures time elapsed.

// Create new stopwatch
Stopwatch stopwatch = new Stopwatch();

// Begin timing
stopwatch.Start();

Threading.Thread.Sleep(500)

// Stop timing
stopwatch.Stop();

Console.WriteLine("Time elapsed: {0}", stopwatch.Elapsed);

Here is a DEMO.

You can use this Stopwatch wrapper:

public class Benchmark : IDisposable 
{
    private readonly Stopwatch timer = new Stopwatch();
    private readonly string benchmarkName;

    public Benchmark(string benchmarkName)
    {
        this.benchmarkName = benchmarkName;
        timer.Start();
    }

    public void Dispose() 
    {
        timer.Stop();
        Console.WriteLine($"{benchmarkName} {timer.Elapsed}");
    }
}

Usage:

using (var bench = new Benchmark($"Insert {n} records:"))
{
    ... your code here
}

Output:

Insert 10 records: 00:00:00.0617594

For advanced scenarios, you can use BenchmarkDotNet or Benchmark.It or NBench

If you use the Stopwatch class, you can use the .StartNew() method to reset the watch to 0. So you don't have to call .Reset() followed by .Start(). Might come in handy.

If you are looking for the amount of time that the associated thread has spent running code inside the application.
You can use ProcessThread.UserProcessorTime Property which you can get under System.Diagnostics namespace.

TimeSpan startTime= Process.GetCurrentProcess().Threads[i].UserProcessorTime; // i being your thread number, make it 0 for main
//Write your function here
TimeSpan duration = Process.GetCurrentProcess().Threads[i].UserProcessorTime.Subtract(startTime);

Console.WriteLine($"Time caluclated by CurrentProcess method: {duration.TotalSeconds}"); // This syntax works only with C# 6.0 and above

Note: If you are using multi threads, you can calculate the time of each thread individually and sum it up for calculating the total duration.