Printing to the console vs writing to a file (speed)

Question

In C++, which would be faster if repeated, say, 5000 times:

cout << \"text!\" << endl;

or

my_text_file <<         


        

Answer 1

It's not that much faster...

A test of 1 million couts with endl (clear buffer):

Results:

console cout time: 2.87001
file cout time: 2.33776

Code:

class Timer
{
        struct timespec startTime, endTime;
        double sec;
public:
        void start();
        void stop();
        double getSec();
};

void Timer::start()
{
        clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, &startTime);
}
void Timer::stop()
{
        clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, &endTime);
        sec = (endTime.tv_sec - startTime.tv_sec);
        sec += (endTime.tv_nsec - startTime.tv_nsec) / 1000000000.0;
}
double Timer::getSec()
{
        return sec;
}


int main(){
        int ntests = 1000000;
        Timer t1 = Timer(), t2 = Timer();

        t1.start();
        for(int c=0;c

Build and run:

g++ test.cpp -o test -lrt && ./test && rm out.txt