# Measure used cycles in call\_with\_payment

**URL:** <https://forum.dfinity.org/t/measure-used-cycles-in-call-with-payment/41389>\
**Category:** Developers\
**Created:** [February 19, 2025, 2:57pm UTC](https://forum.dfinity.org/t/measure-used-cycles-in-call-with-payment/41389 "2025-02-19T14:57:02Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![AlexEmets](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex023/user_avatar/forum.dfinity.org/alexemets/32/20944_2.png) [@AlexEmets](https://forum.dfinity.org/u/AlexEmets)\
**Post date:** [February 19, 2025, 2:57pm UTC](https://forum.dfinity.org/t/measure-used-cycles-in-call-with-payment/41389/1 "2025-02-19T14:57:02Z")

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I’m trying to measure cycle consumption in my canister by taking a simple approach:

1. Record `balance_before = ic_cdk::api::canister_balance()`.
2. Perform some async work (e.g. `call_with_payment128`, external HTTP request, etc.).
3. Record `balance_after = ic_cdk::api::canister_balance()`.
4. Compute `cycles_used = balance_before - balance_after`.

This works fine if only one request is in-flight at a time. However, my canister has multiple “threads” running concurrently, each potentially doing its own `balance_before/balance_after` measurement. Because they can overlap, the final difference in cycles doesn’t necessarily correspond neatly to _just_ one call. For instance, if two calls measure at nearly the same time, their balance deltas can interfere with each other.

**Questions:**

1. Is there any built-in way (similar to `call_with_payment128`) that can tell me _exactly_ how many cycles a particular call or piece of code consumed, without me doing my own balance diffs?
2. If not, how do I accurately charge different users or subscribers for cycles in a concurrent environment?
3. Is there some canisters examples which already implemented these logic? So I can check

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![dsarlis](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex023/user_avatar/forum.dfinity.org/dsarlis/32/689_2.png) [@dsarlis](https://forum.dfinity.org/u/dsarlis)\
**Post date:** [February 20, 2025, 3:07pm UTC](https://forum.dfinity.org/t/measure-used-cycles-in-call-with-payment/41389/2 "2025-02-20T15:07:50Z")

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This approach will not provide you with accurate information for a couple reasons:

1. As you already noticed, concurrent calls can interleave and skew the results.
2. On top of that, the canister is periodically charged for memory it uses, so that will also decrease the balance.
3. And on top of that, the canister might receive (more) ingress messages which also cost some cycles to be inducted.

As such, there’s no built-in way that can tell you exactly how many cycles a piece of code consumed. The best you can do now is measure instructions consumption (which you can then translate to cycles you require from your callers) with a tool like [canbench](https://github.com/dfinity/canbench).