Question

I’ve seen a lot of blogs where authors discuss throwing together quick benchmark tests, like this Ruby 1.9.0 v Python 2.5.1 that Antonio Cangiano “throws together at 3am.”

Is there a simple way to time a script to the millisecond like that that I’m unaware of? Is he probably using built-in functions of OS X or individual libraries? Does Python have a standard lib for this?

How would you do this if you were just going to take the path of least resistance and throw it together at 3am?

Answer 1

If you’re after mere benchmarking, and you’re not too worried about start-up time, and you want it to be programming language independent and you’re on Unix, you’d probably use unix time:

time ruby -e "1.upto(10000000) {|i| i}"
real    0m2.926s
user    0m1.570s
sys 0m1.350s