How do I measure a time interval in C?

High resolution timers that provide a resolution of 1 microsecond are system-specific, so you will have to use different methods to achieve this on different OS platforms. You may be interested in checking out the following article, which implements a cross-platform C++ timer class based on the functions described below:

• [Song Ho Ahn – High Resolution Timer][1]

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Windows

The Windows API provides extremely high resolution timer functions: QueryPerformanceCounter(), which returns the current elapsed ticks, and QueryPerformanceFrequency(), which returns the number of ticks per second.

Example:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <windows.h>                // for Windows APIs

int main(void)
{
    LARGE_INTEGER frequency;        // ticks per second
    LARGE_INTEGER t1, t2;           // ticks
    double elapsedTime;

    // get ticks per second
    QueryPerformanceFrequency(&frequency);

    // start timer
    QueryPerformanceCounter(&t1);

    // do something
    // ...

    // stop timer
    QueryPerformanceCounter(&t2);

    // compute and print the elapsed time in millisec
    elapsedTime = (t2.QuadPart - t1.QuadPart) * 1000.0 / frequency.QuadPart;
    printf("%f ms.\n", elapsedTime);
}

Linux, Unix, and Mac

For Unix or Linux based system, you can use gettimeofday(). This function is declared in “sys/time.h”.

Example:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/time.h>                // for gettimeofday()

int main(void)
{
    struct timeval t1, t2;
    double elapsedTime;

    // start timer
    gettimeofday(&t1, NULL);

    // do something
    // ...

    // stop timer
    gettimeofday(&t2, NULL);

    // compute and print the elapsed time in millisec
    elapsedTime = (t2.tv_sec - t1.tv_sec) * 1000.0;      // sec to ms
    elapsedTime += (t2.tv_usec - t1.tv_usec) / 1000.0;   // us to ms
    printf("%f ms.\n", elapsedTime);
}