Stopwatch in .NET

.NET provides plenty of ways for delaying the execution using timers. But many programmers keep thinking of getting a way out to know the time required to execute a code in the application. How do we do this?

The conventional way to do this is to do something like the following snippet:

int startTime = System.DateTime.Now.Millisecond;
//Code to be evaluated
int stopTime = System.DateTime.Now.Millisecond;
int difference = stopTime - startTime;

But fortunately, .NET provides the Stopwatch Class, in the namespace System.Diagnostics that allows us to accurately measure elapsed time in a software application. This is cleaner and reliable. A Stopwatch instance can measure elapsed time over several intervals with the total elapsed time calculated by adding all of the intervals together.

The difference in time is available as a TimeSpan and is formatted as d.hh:mm:ss.ff:

 

• d = days
• hh = hours
• mm = minutes
• ss = seconds
• ff = fractions of a second

The following is an example of using StopWatch Class to get the time elapsed instead of the above method.

using System.Diagnostics; //namespace

Stopwatch stopWatchObj = new Stopwatch();
stopWatchObj.Start();
// Code to be evaluated
stopWatch.Stop();
TimeSpan ts = stopWatch.Elapsed;

I hope this blog helps in understanding the most convenient way to get the time required to execute a code snippet and helps in making more reliable applications.

Happy Coding.