Timing Your C# Code with the Stopwatch Class

Introduction to System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch

There are a number of 3^rd party tools that can help you profile your code and gauge things like the execution time, amount of memory consumed, number of loops, and other items useful in refactoring your code for optimal performance. There are even some tools natively available as part of Microsoft Visual Studio. These code profiling tools are designed to be used at development time to help optimize your code. As someone that has done a lot of C# programming as an asp.net developer, I find many of my solutions involve calling out to 3^rd party service providers through web services or other types of integrations. There are often service level agreements with the 3^rd parties that are hard to monitor if you don't take steps to ensure that there is timing information baked into your code around the integration point. The System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch class was designed for just this sort of use. It is a lightweight class used to track the amount of time elapsed between some starting and some ending point in time. Let's take a look at a couple of the properties and methods of the Stopwatch class:

• Start() - start the stopwatch
• Stop() - stop the stopwatch
• IsRunning - indicator if the stopwatch is running or not
• Elapsed - the TimeSpan measured by the current instance
• ElapsedMilliseconds - the elapsed time measured by the current instance in milliseconds
• ElapsedTicks - the elapsed time measured by the current instance in timer ticks

It is important to note that the System.Threading.Timer class is often mistaken to provide the type of functionality provided by the Stopwatch class. The Timer provides a mechanism for executing a method at a specified interval, which is completely different than tracking the amount of time elapsed between two points in time.

The following code snippet demonstrates how to wrap a timer around a block of code in order to track the amount of time elapsed since the start and ending execution of the particular block of code.

System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch timer = new System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch();
timer.Start();

for( int loop = 0; loop < 100; loop++; )
{
System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(1000);
}
timer.Stop();
Console.WriteLine("Elapsed time is: {0}", timer.Elapsed);

I commonly wrap code like the example above around all of my service calls. I use an application setting to control whether the elapsed time is recorded. If it is enabled, then after the elapsed time is calculated it is written to a database or other logging location so that the overall performance of the service call can be monitored and tracked over time. This has proven invaluable to me as I have worked with various 3^rd parties to improve the responsiveness of their provided services and ensure that the performance is trending at the target level.

Summary

We took an introductory look at the System.Diagnostic.Stopwatch class. We explored the value that using the stopwatch can provide in order to help monitor the performance of 3^rd party services by tracking the time lapse in making calls to the 3^rd party service.

About the Author:

Mark Strawmyer is a Senior Architect of .NET applications for large and mid-size organizations. Mark is a technology leader with Crowe Horwath LLP in Indianapolis, Indiana. He specializes in architecture, design and development of Microsoft-based solutions. Mark was honored to be named a Microsoft MVP for application development with C# again. You can reach Mark through http://markstrawmyer.com.