ctime

Users of Unix-like operating systems can execute the “time” command to determine how long it takes for a specific application or task to run and complete its job. Obviously, this parameter is in fact a performance measurement tool for commands or scripts: the faster a command or app finishes its work, the better its performance.

The developer of ctime created something similar for Windows, a console –based application that receives an executable app or a script as a parameter and can output statistics about the time needed to make its computations. Please be advised that ctime does execute the target application to measure its performance.

There is nothing complicated about using ctime, as it only requires you to provide the location of the target executable to load it and initiate its measurement. Once the target app finishes its job or is shut down by the user, ctime displays its timings.

There are three different values ctime shows, namely the Real, User and the Sys time. The first is the time between the start of the target program and the time its process is closed. The second represents the total time used across all the cores of the computer’s processor, while the third is the kernel time used.

This comes in handy particularly for developers of multi-threaded programs, as it allows them to check out the performance of their app. As a reference, the user time should be equal to the real time times the number of cores of the CPU.