Time in milliseconds in C

This code snippet can be used for displaying time in seconds,milliseconds and microseconds:

#include <sys/time.h>

struct timeval start, stop;
double secs = 0;

gettimeofday(&start, NULL);

// Do stuff  here

gettimeofday(&stop, NULL);
secs = (double)(stop.tv_usec - start.tv_usec) / 1000000 + (double)(stop.tv_sec - start.tv_sec);
printf("time taken %f\n",secs);

Yes, this program has likely used less than a millsecond. Try using microsecond resolution with timeval.

e.g:

#include <sys/time.h>

struct timeval stop, start;
gettimeofday(&start, NULL);
//do stuff
gettimeofday(&stop, NULL);
printf("took %lu us\n", (stop.tv_sec - start.tv_sec) * 1000000 + stop.tv_usec - start.tv_usec); 

You can then query the difference (in microseconds) between stop.tv_usec - start.tv_usec. Note that this will only work for subsecond times (as tv_usec will loop). For the general case use a combination of tv_sec and tv_usec.

Edit 2016-08-19

A more appropriate approach on system with clock_gettime support would be:

struct timespec start, end;
clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC_RAW, &start);
//do stuff
clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC_RAW, &end);

uint64_t delta_us = (end.tv_sec - start.tv_sec) * 1000000 + (end.tv_nsec - start.tv_nsec) / 1000;