Quickbench is a commandline utility to quickly measure the memory usage and execution time for a given program process. It makes use of the python resource package which is itself a wrapper for the operating system's c api.
$ sudo python3 setup.py install
A quick overview of the available commands can be viewed using the -h commandline flag as shown in the following example.
$ quickbench -h
Furthermore, passing the -v or --verbose flag will also output the following descriptions for the tracked parameters.
Elapsed Time (ms) Wall clock time taken from start to finish of the process execution.
User Time (ms) The amount of CPU time spent in user-mode (outside the kernel) for the process execution.
Sys Time (ms) The amount of CPU time spend in kernel-mode within system calls, as opposed to library code.
Peak Memory Usage (kB) The resident set size (peak memory usage) of the largest of the spawned processes.
# of Minor Page Faults The number of page faults serviced without any I/O activity.
# of Major Page Faults The number of page faults serviced that required I/O activity.
To quickly get an overview of execution time and memory usage, the utility can be invoked as shown in the following example.
$ quickbench "ls -lh" -v
total 8
-rw-r--r-- 1 akash staff 33B 11 Apr 23:54 source.c
-rw-r--r-- 1 akash staff 0B 11 Apr 23:53 test_file.txt
Results from one iteration for command 'ls -lh':
Elapsed Time (ms) 8.087
User Time (ms) 1.791
Sys Time (ms) 3.086
Peak Memory Usage (kB) 847872
# of Minor Page Faults 797
# of Major Page Faults 0
By passing the -i <integer> flag, it is possible to execute the command a given number of times to average out the results. Also note, that it is very useful to also pass the -s flag along with the -i flag to supress the output from the command executions. An example of this is shown below.
$ quickbench "./a.out < test_file.txt" -i10 -s
Results from 10 iterations for command './a.out < test_file.txt':
Min Mean Median Max Std Dev
--- ---- ------ --- -------
Elapsed Time (ms) 10.336 44.552 11.482 342.014 104.519
User Time (ms) 1.869 12.579 12.380 23.090 7.050
Sys Time (ms) 2.959 20.187 20.160 36.503 11.174
Peak Memory Usage (kB) 1044480 1044480 1044480 1044480 0.000
# of Minor Page Faults 941 5177.200 5185 9391 2845.968
# of Major Page Faults 0 0 0 0 0.000