- Windows Processes and Threads
- Process Creation
- Process Identities
- Duplicating Handles
- Exiting and Terminating a Process
- Waiting for a Process to Terminate
- Environment Blocks and Strings
- Example: Parallel Pattern Searching
- Processes in a Multiprocessor Environment
- Process Execution Times
- Example: Process Execution Times
- Generating Console Control Events
- Example: Simple Job Management
- Example: Using Job Objects
- Summary
- Exercises
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Example: Process Execution Times
The next example (Program 6-2) implements the familiar timep (time print) utility that is similar to the UNIX time command (time is supported by the Windows command prompt, so a different name is appropriate). timep prints elapsed (or real), user, and system times.
This program uses GetCommandLine, a Windows function that returns the complete command line as a single string rather than individual argv strings.
The program also uses a utility function, SkipArg, to scan the command line and skip past the executable name. SkipArg is in the Examples file.
Using the timep Command
timep was useful to compare different programming solutions, such as the various Caesar cipher (cci) and sorting utilities, including cci (Program 2-3) and sortMM (Program 5-5). Appendix C summarizes and briefly analyzes some additional results, and there are other examples throughout the book.
Notice that measuring a program such as grepMP (Program 6-1) gives kernel and user times only for the parent process. Job objects, described near the end of this chapter, allow you to collect information on a collection of processes. Run 6-1 and Appendix C show that, on a multiprocessor computer, performance can improve as the separate processes, or more accurately, threads, run on different processors. There can also be performance gains if the files are on different physical drives. On the other hand, you cannot always count on such performance gains; for example, there might be resource contention or disk thrashing that could impact performance negatively.
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