Question

Is there a built-in way to measure execution time of a command on the Windows command line?

Answer 1

If you are using Windows 2003 (note that windows server 2008 and later are not supported) you can use The Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit, which contains timeit.exe that displays detailed execution stats. Here is an example, timing the command "timeit -?":

C:\>timeit timeit -? Invalid switch -? Usage: TIMEIT [-f filename] [-a] [-c] [-i] [-d] [-s] [-t] [-k keyname | -r keyname] [-m mask] [commandline...] where:        -f specifies the name of the database file where TIMEIT                  keeps a history of previous timings.  Default is .\timeit.dat               -k specifies the keyname to use for this timing run               -r specifies the keyname to remove from the database.  If                  keyname is followed by a comma and a number then it will                  remove the slowest (positive number) or fastest (negative)                  times for that keyname.               -a specifies that timeit should display average of all timings                  for the specified key.               -i specifies to ignore non-zero return codes from program               -d specifies to show detail for average               -s specifies to suppress system wide counters               -t specifies to tabular output               -c specifies to force a resort of the data base               -m specifies the processor affinity mask  Version Number:   Windows NT 5.2 (Build 3790) Exit Time:        7:38 am, Wednesday, April 15 2009 Elapsed Time:     0:00:00.000 Process Time:     0:00:00.015 System Calls:     731 Context Switches: 299 Page Faults:      515 Bytes Read:       0 Bytes Written:    0 Bytes Other:      298 

You can get TimeIt in the Windows 2003 Resource Kit. It’s not available for direct download from the Microsoft Download Center, but one can still get it from the archive.org – Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools.