How can I benchmark C code easily?

Question

Is there a simple library to benchmark the time it takes to execute a portion of C code? What I want is something like:

int main(){
    benchmarkBegin(0);
           


        

Answer 1

In POSIX, try getrusage. The relevant argument is RUSAGE_SELF and the relevant fields are ru_utime.tv_sec and ru_utime.tv_usec.

Answer 2

There may be existing utilities that help with this, but I suspect most will use some kind of sampling or possibly injection. But to get specific sections of code timed, you will probably have to add in calls to a timer like you show in your example. If you are using Windows, then the high performance timer works. I answered a similar question and showed example code that will do that. There are similar methods for Linux.

Answer 3

Use the function clock() defined in time.h:

startTime = (float)clock()/CLOCKS_PER_SEC;

/* Do work */

endTime = (float)clock()/CLOCKS_PER_SEC;

timeElapsed = endTime - startTime;

Answer 4

Basically, all you want is a high resolution timer. The elapsed time is of course just a difference in times and the speedup is calculated by dividing the times for each task. I have included the code for a high resolution timer that should work on at least windows and unix.

#ifdef WIN32

#include <windows.h>
double get_time()
{
    LARGE_INTEGER t, f;
    QueryPerformanceCounter(&t);
    QueryPerformanceFrequency(&f);
    return (double)t.QuadPart/(double)f.QuadPart;
}

#else

#include <sys/time.h>
#include <sys/resource.h>

double get_time()
{
    struct timeval t;
    struct timezone tzp;
    gettimeofday(&t, &tzp);
    return t.tv_sec + t.tv_usec*1e-6;
}

#endif