mlpack Timers

mlpack provides a simple timer interface for the timing of machine learning methods. The results of any timers used during the program are displayed at output by any command-line binding, when --verbose is given:

$ mlpack_knn -r dataset.csv -n neighbors_out.csv -d distances_out.csv -k 5 -v
<...>
[INFO ] Program timers:
[INFO ]   computing_neighbors: 0.010650s
[INFO ]   loading_data: 0.002567s
[INFO ]   saving_data: 0.001115s
[INFO ]   total_time: 0.149816s
[INFO ]   tree_building: 0.000534s

🔗 Timer API

In C++, the mlpack::Timers class can be used to add timers to a program. The mlpack::Timers class provides three simple methods:

void Timer::Start(const char* name);
void Timer::Stop(const char* name);
timeval Timer::Get(const char* name);

Every binding is called with an mlpack::Timers&, which can be used in the body of that binding. For the sake of this discussion, let us call that object timers.

Each timer is given a name, and is referenced by that name. You can call timers.Start() and timers.Stop() multiple times for a particular timer name, and the result will be the sum of the runs of the timer. Note that timers.Stop() must be called before timers.Start() is called again, otherwise a std::runtime_error exception will be thrown.

A "total_time" timer is run automatically for each mlpack binding.

🔗 Timer Example

Below is a very simple example of timer usage in code.

~~~c++ #include <mlpack/core.hpp> #include <mlpack/core/util/io.hpp> #define BINDING_TYPE BINDING_TYPE_CLI #include <mlpack/core/util/mlpack_main.hpp>

using namespace mlpack;

void BINDING_FUNCTION(util::Params& params, util::Timers& timers) { // Start a timer. timers.Start(“some_timer”);

// Do some things. DoSomeStuff();

// Stop the timer. timers.Stop(“some_timer”); } @endcode

If the verbose flag was given to this binding, then a command-line binding would print the time that "some_timer" ran for at the end of the program’s output.