How our runtime analysis (Big-O) works

Coderbyte is the only platform where the runtime analysis for your solutions is generated and expressed in Big-O notation automatically in your profile. Below are screenshots of what you can expect to see in your profile and on the results page.

If you are interested in how the server actually works and how we statistically determine the Big-O, we made the code open source. Check out the GitHub repository here.

How it works

When you submit a solution for a challenge and it passes all the test cases, your solution is then sent to our
runtime-analysis server where we run a series of progressively larger test cases, and then statistically determine what runtime trajectory it matches. We currently will return one of the following common Big-O results below. The outcomes range from most optimal at the top to least optimal at the bottom.

As you can see in the screenshot at the top of this page, we also provide the optimal runtime in Big-O notation for a given challenge. This is to help you understand how your algorithm solution compares to the most optimal way of solving the challenge. We curently support the following languages:

  • C
  • C++
  • C#
  • Java
  • JavaScript
  • Kotlin
  • Python
  • PHP
  • Go
  • Ruby
  • TypeScript