Measure time, milliseconds or microseconds for Windows C++ [duplicate]

Answer 1

You're looking for QueryPerformanceCounter and related functions.

Answer 2

You need to use the QPC/QPF APIs to get compute the execution time. Invoke the code you want to between calls to QueryPerformanceCounter and then use QueryPerformanceFrequency to convert it from cycles to microseconds.

LARGE_INTEGER nStartTime;
LARGE_INTEGER nStopTime;
LARGE_INTEGER nElapsed;
LARGE_INTEGER nFrequency;

::QueryPerformanceFrequency(&nFrequency); 
::QueryPerformanceCounter(&nStartTime);

    SomethingToBeTimed();

::QueryPerformanceCounter(&nStopTime);
nElapsed.QuadPart = (nStopTime.QuadPart - nStartTime.QuadPart) * 1000000;
nElapsed.QuadPart /= nFrequency.QuadPart;

References: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dn553408(v=vs.85).aspx

Answer 3

You can use the standard C++ <chrono> library:

#include <iostream>
#include <chrono>

// long operation to time
long long fib(long long n) {
  if (n < 2) {
    return n;
  } else {
    return fib(n-1) + fib(n-2);
  }
}

int main() {
  auto start_time = std::chrono::high_resolution_clock::now();

  long long input = 32;
  long long result = fib(input);

  auto end_time = std::chrono::high_resolution_clock::now();
  auto time = end_time - start_time;

  std::cout << "result = " << result << '\n';
  std::cout << "fib(" << input << ") took " <<
    time/std::chrono::milliseconds(1) << "ms to run.\n";
}

One thing to keep in mind is that using <chrono> enables type safe, generic timing code but to get that benefit you have use it a bit differently than you would use dumb, type-unsafe timing libraries that store durations and time points in types like int. Here's an answer that explains some specific usage scenarios and the differences between using untyped libraries and best practices for using chrono: https://stackoverflow.com/a/15839862/365496

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The maintainer of Visual Studio's standard library implementation has indicated that the low resolution of high_resolution_clock has been fixed in VS2015 via the use of QueryPerformanceCounter().