Tracking the script execution time in PHP

If all you need is the wall-clock time, rather than the CPU execution time, then it is simple to calculate:

//place this before any script you want to calculate time
$time_start = microtime(true); 

//sample script
for($i=0; $i<1000; $i++){
 //do anything
}

$time_end = microtime(true);

//dividing with 60 will give the execution time in minutes otherwise seconds
$execution_time = ($time_end - $time_start)/60;

//execution time of the script
echo '<b>Total Execution Time:</b> '.$execution_time.' Mins';
// if you get weird results, use number_format((float) $execution_time, 10) 

Note that this will include the time that PHP is sat waiting for external resources such as disks or databases, which is not used for max_execution_time.

Shorter version of talal7860's answer

<?php
// At start of script
$time_start = microtime(true); 

// Anywhere else in the script
echo 'Total execution time in seconds: ' . (microtime(true) - $time_start);

As pointed out, this is 'wallclock time' not 'cpu time'

<?php
// Randomize sleeping time
usleep(mt_rand(100, 10000));

// As of PHP 5.4.0, REQUEST_TIME_FLOAT is available in the $_SERVER superglobal array.
// It contains the timestamp of the start of the request with microsecond precision.
$time = microtime(true) - $_SERVER["REQUEST_TIME_FLOAT"];

echo "Did nothing in $time seconds\n";
?>

On unixoid systems (and in php 7+ on Windows as well), you can use getrusage, like:

// Script start
$rustart = getrusage();

// Code ...

// Script end
function rutime($ru, $rus, $index) {
    return ($ru["ru_$index.tv_sec"]*1000 + intval($ru["ru_$index.tv_usec"]/1000))
     -  ($rus["ru_$index.tv_sec"]*1000 + intval($rus["ru_$index.tv_usec"]/1000));
}

$ru = getrusage();
echo "This process used " . rutime($ru, $rustart, "utime") .
    " ms for its computations\n";
echo "It spent " . rutime($ru, $rustart, "stime") .
    " ms in system calls\n";

Note that you don't need to calculate a difference if you are spawning a php instance for every test.