Editing Module:Timing/doc (section)

=== Testing a plain function ===
For example, assume we open a page [[Module:Example]], then we can write a call to profile the function p.hello(). The code in the page looks something like the example below, but local versions may be a little different. (At ''nowiki'' a similar code is at [[w:no:Module:HelloWorld2]].)

The following code is a stripped-down version of [[Module:Example]]. See the page for a full version.
<syntaxhighlight lang="lua">
local p = {};

p.hello = function( frame )
    local str = "Hello World!"
    return str
end

return p
</syntaxhighlight>

Access to this code will be through a generic ''p'' in the debug console. Assuming the previous code the profiler can be called as

<syntaxhighlight lang="lua">
=require 'Module:Timing'(p.hello)
</syntaxhighlight>

A call like that produced for the same type of module a report like the following at enwiki

<pre>
=require 'Module:Timing'(p.hello)
Each call was running for about 1.2e-09 seconds.
	Mean runtime for each set was 1.2e-07 seconds,
	with standard deviation of 1.9e-06 seconds,
	minimum 8.9e-06, maximum 1.5e-05.
	Total time spent was about 2.5e-04 seconds.
Relative load is estimated to 1.0.
</pre>

In this the important information is <samp>Each call was running for about 8.5120000000022E-9 seconds</samp>. This says how long the function actually run.

Note that this function is very simple, and therefore the run time for the function gets close to the run time for the baseline. As a result, the run time for each set gets close to the standard deviation.