Build a Simple Benchmarker

One way that blocks are really useful is performing functionality or 0:00 running code before and after a block is executed. 0:04 This turns out to be really great for writing something like a benchmarker. 0:09 We're going to write a simple one now, and here's how we're gonna do it. 0:13 First, we'll create a class for our benchmarker. 0:17 The class will have one method called run. 0:21 The run method will take a block. 0:24 We'll take the current time before the block of code is run and 0:27 store it in a variable. 0:30 Then we'll run the block, and 0:32 store the current time after the block of code is executed. 0:34 From there, we only need to subtract the end time from the start time and 0:38 print the result. 0:42 Go ahead and give it a try now. 0:45 And then come back and take a look to see how I did. 0:46 And here's a hint. 0:49 You can use the method time.now to get the current time. 0:51 Okay, so let's go ahead and build our SimpleBenchmarker class. 0:56 Now we're going to use a new part of the standard library that we haven't used 0:59 before, called the Time class. 1:04 And Time is pretty interesting. 1:07 Now, that's not a metaphor, I mean the actual Time class. 1:10 We're only really interested in one particular method from the Time class. 1:13 And let's go ahead and scroll down here. 1:20 We're looking at the now method, 1:23 which creates a new Time object for the current time. 1:27 Let's go ahead and see how that works in irb, before we start coding our class. 1:32 And just see how that works real quick. 1:38 We call Time.now, and it returns the current time. 1:40 So this is something that we're going to use in our SimpleBenchmarker class. 1:48 So we're going to create a new file and call it simple_benchmarker.rb. 1:52 And that opens it up for us. 1:57 So now we can create our SimpleBenchmarker class. 2:01 And we're going to create a method called run. 2:09 And that's gonna take a block. 2:16 And what it's gonna do is run this block of code, and 2:17 then print out the time it took to run that code. 2:22 So we can do that by saying yield or block.call. 2:26 We'll just use block.call here. 2:29 No real reason behind that, just something that we're gonna do. 2:32 And let's go ahead and get the start_time before we call the block, and 2:37 the end_time after the block is called. 2:43 So once we do that, we have the end_time and the start_time. 2:49 All we need to do is subtract the two, and we'll know the elapsed time. 2:53 So we can just say elapsed is the end_time minus the start_time. 2:58 And let's go ahead, And print out how long elapsed. 3:05 There we go, this is our SimpleBenchmarker. 3:15 So how do we run this? 3:17 Well, we'll have to instantiate the class and assign it to a variable. 3:19 And now we can say benchmarker.run. 3:27 Now, anything we do in here is going to be printed out with 3:38 the amount of time it took. 3:43 So, let's just say 100.times. 3:46 We'll multiply 1,000 times 1,000. 3:50 And I am gonna save that. 3:56 I click down here, exit out of irb, clear my screen. 4:00 And if I run simple_benchmarker.rb, we can see not very long elapsed. 4:04 Because computers are really fast, and 4:10 they can do math a lot quicker than we can. 4:13 So let's go ahead and change this code. 4:17 And we'll just say we're gonna do something 5.times. 4:20 What I'm gonna do is tell the computer to sleep for a random amount of time. 4:26 We do that by using the sleep method. 4:33 And what sleep is gonna do is nothing. 4:36 It's just going to pause the interpretation of the code, 4:38 just kinda hang out. 4:42 And now I'm going to say, using the rand method, 4:44 between 0.1 and 1.0. 4:47 So all this piece of code is gonna do is just pause the computer, 4:53 the execution time, for a random amount of time between 0.1 seconds and 1.0 seconds. 4:57 These are a couple new methods, just trust me that they work. 5:05 And we could look them up in the documentation if we wanted. 5:08 So let me clear my screen here. 5:11 If we run this benchmarker again, we can see it's not doing anything. 5:14 And now we have the elapsed time of 3.13 seconds. 5:19 Let's go ahead and just write out seconds, to be safe. 5:24 If we wanted to, we could get a little bit more fancy with this and 5:29 print out a dot so we know how long each iteration is taking. 5:33 And that time, it only took 2.8 seconds. 5:43 In fact, 5:48 if we wanted to we could print out a new line here just to separate all those dots. 5:49 That looks a little bit better. 5:58 And then just for fun, let's go ahead and add a description. 6:01 And print out the description. 6:08 And then we could say benchmarker.run, sleep a random amount of time. 6:15 Clear the screen, run it one more time. 6:25 And that looks pretty good. 6:29