i need to find out the processing or operating time in milliseconds or in nanoseconds for the instructions or for the whole process!!!!!

for eg :

i need to calculate the time taken to execute :

main()
{
int n;
scanf("%d",&n);
if( n%2==0) // i need the processing time in milliseconds or in nano
printf("even ");
else
printf("odd");
getch();
}


and i dont want the time for whole program : )

Umm ... the time taken to execute main and everything it calls is the time for the whole program, unless I'm missing something in your question. Anyhow, you can just use the time command on your compiled code, e.g.:

If you need finer grained statistics, look into using gprof.

Measuring the time in nanoseconds, or measuring the time of a few instructions, is not meaningful. CPUs are pipelined enough that there is no useful meaning to the elapsed time of just a few instructions.

I think the finest granularity you can measure is with rdtsc (you can find more info easily with a google search).


Despite the example, I don't have much of a guess at what you're trying to do. If you explain the purpose, maybe you'll get better help.

Does that mean you want the time for just that test and the conditional branch? That is too little to measure. If you tried to use rdtsc to measure that, the attempt to measure would greatly change the thing you're trying to measure (you could measure the time of one rdtsc plus the code you want to measure. But if you subtract the time of one rdtsc from that result, the answer might not be close to what the code you're measuring would have taken without the rdtsc).

If the code you want is executed many times in the course of a very long program execution, then it could be sampled with oprofile to get a statistically valid estimate of an execution time that might be accurate to a nanosecond in extreme cases (normally oprofile doesn't give you close to nanosecond accuracy).

declare as

time_t start,end,time;

start;//from where u want to start

//and

time=end;//up to where is has to calculate will be saved in 'time'

//and print the 'time' using float

Since you're a new member of LQ, you probably don't know to look at things such as the date the question was asked (over six months ago) and the number of posts that the person asking the question has made since then (zero).

Those two things add up to near certainty that the person who asked the question won't be reading your answer.

I'm sure you'd rather answer questions where someone is still interested in the answer.

I also think your answer was incorrect for the question that was asked (all my reasons for that opinion are already explained in post #3 of this thread). But since no one still cares about this answer, we don't need to debate which one is correct.