Question

I am trying to measure elapsed time in Linux. My answer keeps returning zero which makes no sense to me. Below is the way i measure time in my program.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <math.h>
#include <time.h>

main()
{
    double p16 = 1, pi = 0, precision = 1000;
    int k;
    unsigned long micros = 0;
    float millis = 0.0;
    clock_t start, end;
    start = clock();
    // This section calculates pi
    for(k = 0; k <= precision; k++)
    {
        pi += 1.0 / p16 * (4.0 / (8 * k + 1) - 2.0 / (8 * k + 4) - 1.0 / (8 * k + 5) - 1.0 / (8 * k + 6));
        p16 *= 16;
    }
    end = clock();
    micros = end - start;
    millis = micros / 1000;
    printf("%f\n", millis); //my time keeps being returned as 0

    printf("this value of pi is  : %f\n", pi);
}

Answer 1

To start with you need to use floating point arithmetics. Any integer value divided by a larger integer value will be zero, always.

And of course you should actually do something between getting the start and end times.

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By the way, if you have access to gettimeofday it’s normally preferred over clock as it has higher resolution. Or maybe clock_gettime which has even higher resolution.