Thread: time measurement using clock() and time()

  1. #1
    Registered User
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    Jun 2004
    Posts
    8

    time measurement using clock() and time()

    Hi,

    I want to measure the execution time of some part of my program. Therefore I've written something like

    Code:
    ...
    clock_t startTime = clock();
    // do operations
    clock_t endTime = clock();
    std::cout << "elapsed time: " << (double)(endTime - startTime) / CLOCKS_PER_SEC
        << std::endl;
    ...
    This seems to work fine under Windows. However, running the same program under UNIX (sunOS) produced results that didn't appear to be correct to me.

    Therefore, I decided double check the time measurement using the time() function:

    Code:
    ...
    time_t startTime = time(NULL);
    clock_t startClk = clock();
    // do operations
    clock_t endClk = clock();
    time_t endTime = time(NULL);
    std::cout << "elapsed time: " << (double)(endClk - startClk) / CLOCKS_PER_SEC
        << std::endl;
    std::cout << "elapsed time (using time()): " << endTime - startTime << std::endl;
    ...
    This program confirmed my doubts... I got results like 204.04 for the measurement using clock() and 426 for the measurement using time(). CLOCKS_PER_SEC has a value of 1000000.

    The time measurement works fine under windows, i.e. the measurements using clock() and time() yield the same results that appear reasonable to me.

    Can somebody explain me what is going wrong under UNIX? And how to solve the problem? The reason I don't want to use time() is, that I have some parts where a resolution of 1 second is not sufficient.

    Thanks,

    Michael

  2. #2
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