Benchmark

module Benchmark

The Benchmark module provides methods to measure and report the time used to execute Ruby code.

  • Measure the time to construct the string given by the expression "a"*1_000_000_000:

    require 'benchmark'
    
    puts Benchmark.measure { "a"*1_000_000_000 }
    

    On my machine (OSX 10.8.3 on i5 1.7 GHz) this generates:

    0.350000   0.400000   0.750000 (  0.835234)

    This report shows the user CPU time, system CPU time, the sum of the user and system CPU times, and the elapsed real time. The unit of time is seconds.

  • Do some experiments sequentially using the bm method:

    require 'benchmark'
    
    n = 5000000
    Benchmark.bm do |x|
      x.report { for i in 1..n; a