Shortcut Execution Speed

Scripting Forums Shortcuts
#1

I occasionally need to check the execution speed of all or a portion of a shortcut, and I’ve always used the Stopwatch action for this purpose. It’s only accurate to a hundredth of a second, but that’s fine for a shortcut.

It turns out there is a simpler and more accurate approach, which is to use Set Variable actions with the value set to Current Date and the date format to A, which is the elapsed milliseconds in the current day. This approach has an overhead of about 5 milliseconds, but, once again, that’s fine for testing a shortcut.

Shortcut Timer
Shortcut Timer1920×1661 143 KB

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#2

Two Date actions and a Calculate action may be a simpler solution:

timing
timing1320×1493 93.9 KB

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#3

Gluebyte. Thanks for the suggestion, which is simpler and returns similar results, and is the approach I will use. The only substantive difference is that one approach returns milliseconds:

Use Variable with Date Value
Use Variable with Date Value1920×1038 69.1 KB

and the other returns seconds:

Use Current Date
Use Current Date1920×1050 62 KB

BTW, using your approach, the timing result on my M2 Mac mini with no action at all is reliably in the range of 4 to 5 milliseconds. The timing result shown in your screenshot with no action at all is a bit under 2 milliseconds. A few milliseconds is not significant in actual use, but I wonder why the difference.

#4

First few actions in a shortcut seem to run slower than the rest. I had a few more actions prior to the first Date action in the screenshot.

You can try this one for yourself: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/13fe145b99ad46e68099b7a63c9ca234

timing
timing645×1854 149 KB

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#5

Thanks gluebyte–that explains things. My results with your shortcut FWIW.

Timing Result
Timing Result1900×2084 284 KB

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#6

I’ve been using the approach suggested by gluebyte, and this has returned consistent results regardless of how the shortcut was run. On macOS Tahoe RC1, the returned results are ten times what I would expect when the shortcut is run by way of the Shortcut editor.

Timing Test
Timing Test1920×1233 61 KB

A workaround is to run the shortcut by way of Spotlight Search, and the Shortcut editor can be opened or not. Run that way, the above shortcut returned about 0.005 second.