Re: timing an application

[Olaf Dietsche]

Maciej Soltysiak <[e-mail]> writes:

> being inspired by some book about optimizing c++ code i decided to do
> timing of functions i wrote. I am using gettimeofday to set
> two timeval structs and calculate the time between them.
> But the results depend heavily on the load, also i reckon that this
> is an innacurate timing.

You will get elapsed time, which is usually not the same as used cpu
time.

> Any ideas on timing a function, or a block of code? Maybe some kernel
> timers or something.

If you're timing/pofiling some user space functions, gprof should be
sufficient. If you want to profile kernel and module functions as
well, try oprofile at <http://oprofile.sourceforge.net/>. It is part
of the kernel since 2.5.43.

Regards, Olaf.