what is the standardized way in R of measuring the execution time of a function?

Question

I know that I can use system.time before and after the execution and after this take the difference of those, but I want to know any function or a standardized way.

I have tried this:

somesysfunction("myfunction(with,arguments)")

> Start time : 2001-01-01 00:00:00  # output of somesysfunction

> "Result" "of" "myfunction"        # output of myfunction

> End time : 2001-01-01 00:00:10    # output of somesysfunction

> Total Execution time : 10 seconds # output of somesysfunction

Answer 1

The best way is to use system.time() as described by you in the question. To make it a short function use replicate() in it:

system.time( replicate(10000, myfunction(with,arguments) ) )

Here replicate is used to repeat the process “10000” times. It’s not important to use this as it’s only used to make the code shorter.

> System.time::system.time(log10(5), log(5)/log(10), times = 10000) Unit: nanoseconds

expr               min lq mean median   uq max neval cld

log10(5) 0        0     0 25.5738   0               1 10265 10000  a

log(5)/log(10)   0    0   28.1838   0              1 10265 10000

Here both the expressions were evaluated 10000 times, with mean execution time being around 25-30 ns.

Or, install the rbenchmark package as it allows us to specify how many times to replicate the test and would the relative benchmark would be.

To install it click here.