"No doubt you've all seen on Google's search page where it tells you how long your search took to complete. This, and some talk I noticed a while back in one of the forums about some of the scripts that were taking a while to execute made me think about how you would go about timing your scripts."

"The easiest way of timing a script would be to get the time at the beginning of the script and then get the time at the end of the script. The difference between the two is the time it took your script to run. PHP has a function time() which returns the number of seconds since 1970. Now I can't speak for everyone here, but typically the scripts that I write tend to finish running within a second. So measuring the time in seconds is not really going to help me. A topical example would be using something like an egg timer to time the 100m Olympic final - unless someone breaks both their legs on the starting blocks, all the runners will be within 1 egg timer. The microtime() function gives us what we need - the fractional part of the second at the time that the function was called. It also gives us the number of seconds since 1970 like time() does, so we don't need to call both functions. The only problem with the microtime() function is that it returns to us a string with 2 numbers in it - the seconds part, and the fractional part - separated by a space."

Complete Story

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