I needed a stopwatch to time how long operations take and also for a traffic shaper implementation. Didn’t find any public implementations so rolled my own General/ObjC class based on this technical Q&A - http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2004/qa1398.html . I should note that this implementation should have less overhead than using gettimeofday(). The stopwatch provides nanosecond precision and you can get it from http://1nsp1r3d.co.uk/work/cocoa/utilities/stopwatch/ When you want to time some parts of your code, create a stopwatch object and start it.

General/MDNanoStopWatch* watch = General/[[MDNanoStopWatch alloc] init]; [watch start]; // your code … [watch stop]; General/NSLog(@”%qi nanoseconds elapsed”, [watch value]); [watch release];

The stop method also returns the time elapsed so you can just write

General/NSLog(@”%qi nanoseconds elapsed”, [watch stop]);

You can reuse a a single stopwatch object as many times as you want. If you find this class useful/crappy/buggy please leave a comment. Thanks.