Measure the time taken by the program

Question

I have the .exe of a program which has been generated from C++.

Is there some simple snippet which I could just insert to get the time taken by the program. I have the C++ code available but I don't want to tweak it much.

Answer 1

Read about Boost.Timers . Code sample to measure time will be:

#include <boost/timer/timer.hpp>

boost::timer t0;
// do smth
std::cout<<"elapsed: "<< t0.elapsed() << " s\n";

Answer 2

A simple way to measure the time taken by some part (or all) of your program is to take a snapshot of the current time at the start and then subtract it from the current time at the end. On Windows, you could use the GetTickCount function for this. I commonly wrap this in a little helper struct:

struct Duration {
  Duration( const char *name )
    : m_start( ::GetTickCount() ),
    m_name( name )
 { }

  ~Duration() {
    std::cout << m_name << " executed in " << ::GetTickCount() - start << "ms" << std::endl;
  }

  const DWORD m_start;
  const std::string m_name;
};

You can use it like this:

int main()
{
  Duration d( "Program" );

  // Heavy work being done here
}

A little timing information is printed to stdout as the Duration object is destroyed.

Answer 3

On unix you would just need to prefix the executable command with "time", and if you by chance have Cygwin installed, then that's what I what suggest to use. Otherwise check Performance Counters , which is the very source of the process performance data on MS platform. It should be possible to do the trick with a pain of one extra method call before the app exit.