[Tutor] measuring the start up time of an event-driven program

[Albert-Jan Roskam]

Hi,

I would like to test how long it takes for two versions of the same program to start up and be ready to receive commands. The program is SPSS version-very-old vs. SPSS version-latest.

Normally I'd just fire the program up in a subprocess and measure the time before and after finishing. But this kind of program is never finished. It's looping until infinity and waiting for events/commands. I tried wrapping it in a "while True" loop, and break out of the loop and terminate the program (using ctypes) if the retcode of the process is equal to zero. But that doesn't work. 


I know that, in case of spss, there is a Python api available, but this would measure the start-up time of spss without the graphical interface, only the backend. That's not what I want. I want to know how long the user on average needs to wait before he can start doing analyses in SPSS. If it takes way much longer in the new version, the user might be more inclined not to close the program after use, which may lead to a lack of concurrent licenses.

 
Thanks!


Regards,
Albert-Jan


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