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Given a piece of code, I may use one of many methods to determine the big O complexity of the code manually (runtime and memory).

But, for a given piece of code, how do I determine whether what I found earlier is correct or not? Are there tools available where I give an EXE, give test cases and I get an output saying that the runtime is O(n^2) and memory usage is O(1) for instance?

user87166
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  • It is obvious, due to the definition of big-O, there cannot be tools which will can prove or disprove a complexity for sure. However, I think the question makes sense if you ask for a tool or method to check the plausibility of a certain complexity by utilizing an implementation. – Doc Brown Jun 18 '16 at 11:09
  • ... the "tool" which you can use for this check is called regression analysis. Of course, you have to produce a set of samples, for example, for the running time, controlled by some "n". – Doc Brown Jun 18 '16 at 11:18
  • @DocBrown Thanks, are you aware of any tools\libraries to perform regression analysis against C# code\console apps? – user87166 Jun 18 '16 at 11:56
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    Don't expect an out-of-the-box solution. For regression analysis, you can use, for example, MS Excel/and or R (the programming language), see here http://www.gardenersown.co.uk/education/lectures/r/regression.htm. To collect the data for that step, you will have to write some code on your own beforehand. If you prefer that, use C#, then it is pretty simple to write a helper program which starts an arbitrary command line program with a certain set of parameters and measure its run time. – Doc Brown Jun 18 '16 at 22:26

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AFAIK, there are no such tools. Google didn't find one for me. But feel free to look again :-)

Actually, I wouldn't expect a standalone tool to either be accurate ... or generally useful.

  • It is unlikely to be accurate because there are all sorts of factors in a typical application that distort the performance data that you can measure "from the outside". For example, the behavior of a typical garbage collector.

  • It is unlikely to be useful for a couple of reasons:

    • Big-O complexity measures are generally applied to specific parts of a program rather than a program as a whole.

    • For a typical program, the scaling parameters involve the size of input files. In most cases, it is not possible for a general "complexity measurement" tool to generate meaningful input files of various sizes.

    • Finally, when we have a complete / working application, the big-O complexity is largely of academic interest. What is really interesting is the actual performance measures; i.e. how much actual time and space is required to run the application for a given dataset / parameters. Big-O complexity doesn't predict that.

Stephen C
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