Live Chat!

use time command as a simple benchmark tool

1 votos Vota!!

October 20th, 2007 mysurface Posted in Calculation, time | Hits: 20355 |

Sometimes you need to track execution time for some apps for benchmarking, time command is a handy tool. Let say you have wrote few scripts trying to grep some info from some log files, each of the scripts uses different techniques or command combos. You can run your scripts along with time command, and compare their’s execution time.

Let’s assume you have written two script name script1.sh and script2.sh. You can do this

time ./script1.sh

Same thing to script2.sh, and the results will looks as bellow:

real    0m1.005s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.008s

real shows you the execution time script1.sh takes, o minutes 1.005 seconds. user and sys tracks the CPU processing time. From the results, shows us that script1.sh uses 8 milliseconds CPU processing time in kernel mode (sys) and None in user mode.

Related Posts
A Grammar Checker for Open Office
The spelling checker is installed by default in Open Office, but what's missing is grammar checker. For those who are w...

convert wallpaper format and size examples
Image manipulations can be done through command lines. Most of the time, we use GUI software such as GIMP to manipulate ...

array and for loop in awk
grep is always a useful tools to help analyze logs. When the logs are managed nicely in rows and columns format, awk wil...

6 Responses to “use time command as a simple benchmark tool”

  1. cappy Says:
    November 6th, 2007 at 10:47 am

    Wow — that’s exactly what I needed. I wish I had a good, long script I could use it with, though. :(

  2. Patrick Says:
    December 9th, 2007 at 1:52 am

    Thanks!

    So simple but so useful

  3. m6mb3rtx Says:
    December 30th, 2008 at 4:46 am

    Excellent!!!

    Elegant as always, i love Linux :)

  4. theGrizz Says:
    February 11th, 2009 at 9:22 am

    Useful, thanks!

  5. dano Says:
    October 8th, 2009 at 3:27 am

    I have a simple short script for test. (cursor)
    The only output I can get is:

    {$}[4] time ./cursor
    0.005u 0.062s 0:06.85 0.8% 0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w

    If I try: time -f ./cursor or any other switch I get:
    -f: Command not found.

    even if I try time -V or –version it’s still: command not found… ???

  6. mabelode Says:
    February 15th, 2010 at 10:41 pm

    I had the same problem.

    try it with /usr/bin/time.

    I found the solution at:
    http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/cmd/cmd.csp?path=t/time

Leave a Reply

Security Code: