Is microtime enough to get consumed time in software application

I heard that few engineers are debating on to find out actual time consumption in profile page and specially accuracy in php micortime. A sort of benchmarking that tells how much CPU utilization were involved in new peaces of code.

We live in a time of multi-tasking,multi processors and background processing. So debating on microtime or cpu usages is worthless if you are working for web application. Each and every measurement and benchmarking is required to make robust and reliable application.

Lets back to system time,wall time debate.

Open a browser for one hour doesn’t mean that computer has spent an hour of dedicating it’s resources to the browser.(unless it’s IE of course…:P)

Also its depend on application. APC,memcached,varnish,gearman,cassandra etc can divert the result to benchmark application as well as estimated results.

There are three different types of times which was taken by application.

1. System time(processor spends on behalf of the current process)
2. User time (time spend in executing code in user mode)
3. Wall time (Amount of time that passes on our wall clock while process runs)

The advantage of system time is it will give the amount of time that any subproccesses right down to the low lever system processes (ie. file i/o, socket operations) take. This can also be a
disadvantage though because it may make it harder to determine if a bottleneck is happening in your code or in some sub-system your code uses.

getrusage() information is CPU time used and microtime() is wall clock time. The program may run for 10 minutes according to the clock on the wall, but internally may only use a few seconds of CPU
time. Then there's contending for CPU time with all the background programs running on the system, resource contention, plus regular housekeeping.

There's far too many factors involved to be able to get an accurate timing for such short periods. Doing three runs of the while(microtime()) version of loop, I got the following timings:

user: 0.98, 0.09, 0.90 sys: 0.12, 0.05, 0.94

Obviously quite the variance. Even just a simple has utime/stimes ranging from 0 to 0.03.

Try running application longer periods, and do something within them to increase cpu usage.

API in PHP to check server Load
// make sure safe mode shud be off

function ServerLoad()
{
    $stats = exec('uptime');
    preg_match('/averages?: ([0-9.]+),[s]+([0-9.]+),[s]+([0-9.]+)/', $stats, $regs);
    return ($regs[1].', '.$regs[2].', '.$regs[3]);
}

Happy Coding !!! Enjoy !