Accurate way to measure execution times of php scripts

You can use microtime(true) with following manners:

Put this at the start of your php file:

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

// your script code goes here

// do something

Put this at the end of your php file:

// Display Script End time
$time_end = microtime(true);

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

//execution time of the script
echo '<b>Total Execution Time:</b> '.$execution_time.' Mins';

It will output you result in minutes.

You can use REQUEST_TIME from the $_SERVER superglobal array. From the documentation:

REQUEST_TIME
The timestamp of the start of the request. (Available since PHP 5.1.0.)

REQUEST_TIME_FLOAT
The timestamp of the start of the request, with microsecond precision. (Available since PHP 5.4.0.)

This way you don't need to save a timestamp at the beginning of your script. You can simply do:

<?php
// Do stuff
usleep(mt_rand(100, 10000));

// At the end of your script
$time = microtime(true) - $_SERVER["REQUEST_TIME_FLOAT"];

echo "Did stuff in $time seconds\n";
?>

Here, $time would contain the time elapsed since the start of the script in seconds, with microseconds precision (eg. 1.341 for 1 second and 341 microseconds)

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More info:

PHP documentation: $_SERVER variables and microtime function

You can use the microtime function for this. From the documentation:

microtime — Return current Unix timestamp with microseconds

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If get_as_float is set to TRUE, then microtime() returns a float, which represents the current time in seconds since the Unix epoch accurate to the nearest microsecond.

Example usage:

$start = microtime(true);
while (...) {

}
$time_elapsed_secs = microtime(true) - $start;