Skip to main content

C# - Benchmarking with Stopwatch [Beginner]


If you have ever wondered about how to properly measure execution time in your application then this is the post for you. In this post I will show you how to track time in your application with basic .NET, then we will create a pretty abstraction to make sure you Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY).

Our focus will be around the Stopwatch class introduced in .NET 2.0. Stopwatch can be found under the System.Diagnostics namespace and is described by MSDN as follows:
[The Stopwatch class] provides a set of methods and properties that you can use to accurately measure elapsed time.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.diagnostics.stopwatch.aspx

 

Basics

// method #1
var stopwatch = new Stopwatch ();
stopwatch.Start ();
LongRunningProcess ();
stopwatch.Stop ();
Console.WriteLine ("Method #1 Total seconds: {0}", stopwatch.Elapsed.TotalSeconds);

There are four steps you need to take to use the Stopwatch class:
  1. Instantiate the Stopwatch class.
  2. Explicitly Start the stopwatch.
  3. Explicitly Stop the stopwatch.
  4. Output your results using Elapsed which is a TimeSpan.
Stopwatch is really great for quick and dirty benchmarking. It is no substitute for a good profiler, but can be helpful to get rough estimates. As you can see above, the code is tedious. Four steps to benchmark our code can start to get messy.

 

Abstraction

So let's look at the final result and work our way backwards.
// method #2
using (Benchmark.Start("Method #2")) {
    LongRunningProcess ();
}
 
Pretty sweet right? How am I achieving this? Well let me show you.
// Reuseable Stopwatch wrapper
public class Benchmark : IDisposable
{
    Stopwatch _watch;
    string _name;

    public static Benchmark Start (string name)
    {
        return new Benchmark (name);
    }

    private Benchmark (string name)
    {
        _name = name;
        _watch = new Stopwatch ();
        _watch.Start ();
    }

    #region IDisposable implementation

    // dispose stops stopwatch and prints time, could do anytying here
    public void Dispose ()
    {
        _watch.Stop ();
        Console.WriteLine ("{0} Total seconds: {1}"
                           , _name, _watch.Elapsed.TotalSeconds);
    }

    #endregion
}
 
We start the Stopwatch class as soon as we Start, and then we take advantage of IDisposable to Stop. When we do Stop, we just output our result. You get completely reusable code and the added benefit of just being able to wrap particular sections of troublesome code. The nice thing about this abstraction is that it will not interfere with your code paths. This is the output of both the first and second method of using Stopwatch.

Output of console

 

Conclusion

Stopwatch is an awesome class, use it when you are wondering where your bottlenecks are. The abstraction I have included in this post is easily adaptable to write out to anything that makes sense: Database, Log files, EventLog, or Web Service. Give it a try and let me know what you think, I'd love to hear your feelings.

P.S. I used Mono and Xamarin Studio to write this code, so don't be confused by the screenshot. :)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

C# Snippet - Shuffling a Dictionary [Beginner]

Randomizing something can be a daunting task, especially with all the algorithms out there. However, sometimes you just need to shuffle things up, in a simple, yet effective manner. Today we are going to take a quick look at an easy and simple way to randomize a dictionary, which is most likely something that you may be using in a complex application. The tricky thing about ordering dictionaries is that...well they are not ordered to begin with. Typically they are a chaotic collection of key/value pairs. There is no first element or last element, just elements. This is why it is a little tricky to randomize them. Before we get started, we need to build a quick dictionary. For this tutorial, we will be doing an extremely simple string/int dictionary, but rest assured the steps we take can be used for any kind of dictionary you can come up with, no matter what object types you use. Dictionary < String , int > origin = new Dictionary < string , int >();
1 comment
Read more

C# Snippet - The Many Uses Of The Using Keyword [Beginner]

What is the first thing that pops into your mind when you think of the using keyword for C#? Probably those lines that always appear at the top of C# code files - the lines that import types from other namespaces into your code. But while that is the most common use of the using keyword, it is not the only one. Today we are going to take a look at the different uses of the using keyword and what they are useful for. The Using Directive There are two main categories of use for the using keyword - as a "Using Directive" and as a "Using Statement". The lines at the top of a C# file are directives, but that is not the only place they can go. They can also go inside of a namespace block, but they have to be before any other elements declared in the namespace (i.e., you can't add a using statement after a class declaration). Namespace Importing This is by far the most common use of the keyword - it is rare that you see a C# file that does not h
Post a Comment
Read more

C# WPF Printing Part 2 - Pagination [Intermediate]

About two weeks ago, we had a tutorial here at SOTC on the basics of printing in WPF . It covered the standard stuff, like popping the print dialog, and what you needed to do to print visuals (both created in XAML and on the fly). But really, that's barely scratching the surface - any decent printing system in pretty much any application needs to be able to do a lot more than that. So today, we are going to take one more baby step forward into the world of printing - we are going to take a look at pagination. The main class that we will need to do pagination is the DocumentPaginator . I mentioned this class very briefly in the previous tutorial, but only in the context of the printing methods on PrintDialog , PrintVisual (which we focused on last time) and PrintDocument (which we will be focusing on today). This PrintDocument function takes a DocumentPaginator to print - and this is why we need to create one. Unfortunately, making a DocumentPaginator is not as easy as
Post a Comment
Read more