Recording time taken by code - c++

Question

I used the following function to find the time taken by my code.
#include <sys/time.h>
struct timeval start, end;
gettimeofday(&start,NULL);
//mycode
gettimeofday(&end,NULL);
cout<<" time taken by my code: "<<((end.tv_sec - start.tv_sec) * 1000000 + end.tv_usec - start.tv_usec ) / 1000.0<<" msec"<<endl;
I observed that even though my code runs for 2 hours, yet the time reported by the above function is 1213 milliseconds. I am not able to understand as to why is it happened. Also is there a way by which I may record the time taken by my code in hours correctly

Answer 1

My best guess is that time_t (the type of tv_sec) on your system is signed 32 bits and that (end.tv_sec - start.tv_sec) * 1000000 overflows.
You could test that theory by making sure that you don't use 32 bit arithmetic for this computation:
(end.tv_sec - start.tv_sec) * 1000000LL
That being said, I advise use of the C++11 <chrono> library instead:
#include <chrono>
auto t0 = std::chrono::system_clock::now();
//mycode
auto t1 = std::chrono::system_clock::now();
using milliseconds = std::chrono::duration<double, std::milli>;
milliseconds ms = t1 - t0;
std::cout << " time taken by my code: " << ms.count() << '\n';
The <chrono> library has an invariant that none of the "predefined" durations will overflow in less than +/- 292 years. In practice, only nanoseconds will overflow that quickly, and the other durations will have a much larger range. Each duration has static ::min() and ::max() functions you can use to query the range for each.
The original proposal for <chrono> has a decent tutorial section that might be a helpful introduction. It is only slightly dated. What it calls monotonic_clock is now called steady_clock. I believe that is the only significant update it lacks.

Answer 2

On which platform are you doing this? If it's Linux/Unix-like your easiest non-intrusive bet is simply using the time command from the command-line. Is the code you're running single-threaded or not? Some of the functions in time.h (like clock() e.g. ) return the number of ticks against each core, which may or may not be what you want. And the newer stuff in the chrono may not be as exact as you like (a while back I tried to measure time intervals in nanoseconds with chrono, but the lowest time interval I got back back then was 300ns, which was much less exact than I'd hoped).

Answer 3

This part of the bench marking process may help your purpose:
#include<time.h>
#include<cstdlib>
...
...
float begin = (float)clock()/CLOCKS_PER_SEC;
...
//do your bench-marking stuffs
...
float end = (float)clock()/CLOCKS_PER_SEC;
float totalTime = end - begin;
cout<<"Time Req in the stuffs: "<<totalTime<<endl;
NOTE: This process is a simple alternative to the chrono library

Answer 4

If you are on linux and the code that you want to time is largely the program itself, then you can time your program by passing it as an argument to the time command and look at the 'elapsed time' row.
/usr/bin/time -v <your program's executable>
For example:
/usr/bin/time -v sleep 3 .../home/aakashah/workspace/head/src/GroverStorageCommon
Command being timed: "sleep 3"
User time (seconds): 0.00
System time (seconds): 0.00
Percent of CPU this job got: 0%
Elapsed (wall clock) time (h:mm:ss or m:ss): 0:03.00
Average shared text size (kbytes): 0
Average unshared data size (kbytes): 0
Average stack size (kbytes): 0
Average total size (kbytes): 0
Maximum resident set size (kbytes): 2176
Average resident set size (kbytes): 0
Major (requiring I/O) page faults: 0
Minor (reclaiming a frame) page faults: 165
Voluntary context switches: 2
Involuntary context switches: 0
Swaps: 0
File system inputs: 0
File system outputs: 0
Socket messages sent: 0
Socket messages received: 0
Signals delivered: 0
Page size (bytes): 4096
Exit status: 0