Simple performance stopwatch

I often needed to know how long a process took. I could use BenchmarkDotNet, but BenchmarkDotNet its takes a long time to get the results and hard to setup so I built simpler performance method, called TimeThings. TimeThings is easy to use, (only needs three lines of code), you can add TimeThings to your unit tests, and its pretty fast (~5 ms) so doesn't slow down your unit tests. I usually use TimeThings to get a "quick and dirty" performance while I'm building a new application. However if the code performance is important I use BenchmarkDotNet to get accurate timing, for instance I used BenchmarkDotNet in performance is important Net.DistributedFileStoreCache.

TimeThings used in Xunit unit tests

I usually TimeThings in my Xunit unit tests, and the code below shows a basic use, but you be aware most unit tests run in parallel, which affect the time a process takes. Therefore you need to run the Xunit's ON ITS OWN to get the correct performance timing. The code below shows a Xunit with the a TimeThings - the result performance time is sent to your Test Explorer's output panel.

public class PerfBookJsonContext
{
    private readonly ITestOutputHelper _output;
    public PerfBookJsonContext(ITestOutputHelper output) => _output = output;

    [Fact]
    public void TestWithTimeThings()
    {
        //SETUP                  
        //your test setup

        //ATTEMPT
        using (new TimeThings(output)) //The performance time it sent to your 
        {
            //your process you need to test and 
        }

        //VERIFY
        //your test checks
    }
}

TimeThings used in outside of Xunit

The TimeThings has a version which takes an Action<TimeThingResult> which is fills in the performance data when the TimeThings is disposed.

[Fact]
public void TestTimeThingResultReturn()
{
    //SETUP                  
    TimeThingResult result = null;

    //ATTEMPT
    using (new TimeThings(x => result = x))
    {
        Thread.Sleep(10);
    }

    //VERIFY
    //your test checks
}

The TimeThings's result data

The TimeThings examples shown so far only uses the first parameter, but there are two optional parameters. Here is the Xunit's TimeThings class:

public TimeThings(ITestOutputHelper output, string message = "", int numRuns = 0)

And here are the types of output string you would get for the three possibilities.

new TimeThings	output string
new TimeThings(_output)	"took 1.64 ms."
new TimeThings(_output, "Sample 1")	"Sample 1 took 1.64 ms."
new TimeThings(_output, "read book", 500)	"500 x read book took 23.45 ms., ave. per run = 46.90 us."

Note that the third version will return an average time by just dividing the overall time but the number of numRuns, which is scaled to make the timing more useful. The time types are:

short name	full name
sec.	Seconds
ms.	Milliseconds
us.	Microseconds
ns.	Nanoseconds

END