instructions excution time

Question

can i get to know how much time exactly some set of instructions take to execute ?

thanks in advance :)

Answer 1

Hi,

Use the System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch class, i.e something like

System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch stopWatch = new System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch();

stopWatch.Start();

// your instructionrs here

stopWatch.Stop();

then you can refer to either

stopWatch.ElapsedTicks, stopWatch.ElapsedMilliseconds, or stopWatch.Elapsed which returns a TimeSpan object that will break the time taken down in to seconds/minutes etc.

Alternatively, if you have the right sku of VS (not sure if you need Pro, Developer or Team Suite)  there is a source code profiler built in which can be used from the 'Anaylze' menu of VS... if you have it. There are also some free/cheap profiler... Red Gate Software's one seems to be popular.

Answer 2

There are two ways to get an approximation of the amount of time it takes to execute a block of code.

The most common means of doing this is to use a Code Profiler.  There are many good commercial profilers for C#, and a few free ones (though somewhat less feature rich).

Alternatively, you can use a System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch to time the lines of code/method call in question yourself.  The stopwatch MSDN page has sample code demonstrating its use.

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Reed Copsey, Jr. - http://reedcopsey.com