RcppClock

RcppClock is a simple wrapper for std::chrono::high_resolution_clock that makes benchmarking Rcpp code easy.

Install RcppClock from CRAN.

install.packages("RcppClock")
library(RcppClock)
?RcppClock

The Rcpp side of things

Load the RcppClock header into your R session using library(RcppClock), link it in your DESCRIPTION file or with //[[Rcpp::depends(RcppClock)]], and load the header library into individual .cpp files with #include <RcppClock.h>:

//[[Rcpp::depends(RcppClock)]]
#include <RcppClock.h>
#include <thread>

//[[Rcpp::export]]
void sleepy(){
  Rcpp::Clock clock;
  
  clock.tick("both_naps");
  
  clock.tick("short_nap");
  std::this_thread::sleep_for(std::chrono::milliseconds(10));  
  clock.tock("short_nap");
  
  clock.tick("long_nap");
  std::this_thread::sleep_for(std::chrono::milliseconds(100));  
  clock.tock("long_nap");

  clock.tock("both_naps");
  
  // send the times to the R global environment variable, named "naptimes"
  clock.stop("naptimes");
}

.tick(std::string) starts a new timer. Provide a name to record what is being timed.

.tock(std::string) stops a timer. It is important to use the same name as declared in .tick().

.stop(std::string) calculates the duration between all .tick() and .tock() timing results, and creates an object in the R environment with the name provided.

The R side of things

On the R end, we can now do stuff with the "naptimes" variable that was created in the above Rcpp function:

sleepy()
# global variable "naptimes" is now created in the environment
naptimes

summary(naptimes, units = "us")

plot(naptimes)

Timing multiple replicates

If a .tick() with the same name is called multiple times, RcppClock automatically groups the results.

The following code reproduces the ?fibonacci function example included in the RcppClock package:

int fib(int n) {
  return ((n <= 1) ? n : fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2));
}

//[[Rcpp::export]]
void fibonacci(std::vector<int> n, int reps = 10) {
  Rcpp::Clock clock;
  
  while(reps-- > 0){
    for(auto number : n){
      clock.tick("fib" + std::to_string(number));
      fib(number);
      clock.tock("fib" + std::to_string(number));
    }
  }
  clock.stop("clock");
}

On the R end, we'll get an object named "clock":

fibonacci(n = 25:35, reps = 10)
# global variable "clock" is created in the R global environment
clock

plot(clock)

Limitations

• Not compatible with OpenMP parallelization.
• Processes taking less than a microsecond cannot be reliably timed on some platforms.