benchmarks

While doing Drupal development, you sometimes might want to find out how fast or slow a certain part in your code is. Did you know that Drupal has 3 easy functions to do this built right in to core, timer_start($name), timer_read($name) and timer_stop($name).

You can have multiple timers in one run and each one of them is identified by the $name parameter you have to pass to each of these three functions.
I think the functions are pretty self explanatory:

• timer_start starts a timer
• timer_read tells you how long the timer has been running
• and timer_stop stops the timer and returns an array that contains the number of times the timer has been started and stopped (count) and the accumulated timer value in ms (time).