Ruby 2.1: Process.clock_gettime()

Cpu vs idle time is one of the first things I look at when benchmarking rails requests.

Cpu time consists of number crunching, template rendering, method invocation and any other time spent executing instructions on the CPU. Idle time is everything else- generally this is time spent waiting on disk or network I/O, and can be highly variable depending on disk activity, remote server load, network conditions, etc.

In the past I’ve used ruby-prof’s RubyProf::Measure::ProcessTime.measure to measure cpu time, but with Ruby 2.1 we have a clock_gettime(3) wrapper built-in!

def time
  real = Time.now
  cpu  = Process.clock_gettime(Process::CLOCK_PROCESS_CPUTIME_ID)
  yield
  cpu  = Process.clock_gettime(Process::CLOCK_PROCESS_CPUTIME_ID) - cpu
  real = Time.now - real
  { real: real, cpu: cpu, idle: real-cpu }
end

>> time{ sleep 1 }                           # all idle time
=> {:real=>1.000452, :cpu=>0.00041599999999997195, :idle=>1.000036}

>> time{ 10000.times{2**65536} }             # all cpu time
=> {:real=>0.21192, :cpu=>0.211714, :idle=>0.00020599999999998397}

>> time{ open('http://google.com').read }    # mixed, mostly idle
=> {:real=>0.342832, :cpu=>0.05224400000000001, :idle=>0.290588}

The method also takes an optional second argument unit, which can be :millisecond, :microsecond, :nanosecond, or a :float_ variant thereof. See the documentation for more details.