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

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 02:18:43AM -0700, Albert-Jan Roskam wrote:
> 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.

I don't think this is a Python question. I think this is a "what tools 
does my operating system provide for fine testing of process startup 
time?" question.

I'm not an expert, but I suspect that the answer will be, "none". Which 
OS are you using?

If the SPSS app has the ability to run commands specified from a 
script, and then automatically exit, perhaps you can approximate 
start-up time as "start-up, run an empty script, and exit" time, 
assuming that running the script and exiting will be negligible.

Or, if the app is slow enough (I'm looking at you Chrome, fastest way to 
browse the web my arse) perhaps you could just time it with a 
stop-watch.


> 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.

If you have to measure the difference to notice the difference, the 
average user won't notice the difference.



-- 
Steven