Question

I looked through old threads but could not find the answer to my question:

How can I time the body of my function inside a C program?

Answer 1

A simple method is to use the ‘clock’ function:

#include <time.h>

clock_t start, end;
double cpu_time_used;

start = clock();
... /* Do whatever you want to time */
end = clock();
cpu_time_used = ((double) (end - start)) / CLOCKS_PER_SEC;

Or if you’re on linux you can use the ‘time’ command to time how long it takes your app to execute; this doesn’t allow you to time a specific code section though, and includes time taken to initiate the process etc.

time ./myapp

Edit: This is very much a basic ‘hack-in-a-quick-timer’ approach. For true performance profiling you want to look at a proper profiler, as suggested by Larry Watanabe.