Question

Am I doing it correctly? At times, my program will print 2000+ for the chrono solution and it always prints 1000 for the CLOCKS_PER_SEC..

What is that value I’m actually calculating? Is it Clocks Per Sec?

#include <iostream>
#include <chrono>
#include <thread>
#include <ctime>

std::chrono::time_point<std::chrono::high_resolution_clock> SystemTime()
{
    return std::chrono::high_resolution_clock::now();
}

std::uint32_t TimeDuration(std::chrono::time_point<std::chrono::high_resolution_clock> Time)
{
    return std::chrono::duration_cast<std::chrono::nanoseconds>(SystemTime() - Time).count();
}

int main()
{
    auto Begin = std::chrono::high_resolution_clock::now();
    std::this_thread::sleep_for(std::chrono::milliseconds(1));
    std::cout<< (TimeDuration(Begin) / 1000.0)<<std::endl;

    std::cout<<CLOCKS_PER_SEC;
    return 0;
}

Answer 1

In order to get the correct ticks per second on Linux, you need to use the return value of ::sysconf(_SC_CLK_TCK) (declared in the header unistd.h), rather than the macro CLOCKS_PER_SEC.

The latter is a constant defined in the POSIX standard – it is unrelated to the actual ticks per second of your CPU clock. For example, see the man page for clock:

C89, C99, POSIX.1-2001. POSIX requires that CLOCKS_PER_SEC equals 1000000 independent of the actual resolution.

However, note that even when using the correct ticks-per-second constant, you still won’t get the number of actual CPU cycles per second. “Clock tick” is a special unit used by the CPU clock. There is no standardized definition of how it relates to actual CPU cycles.