how to estimate gas cost?

Question

I have a function that iterate through an array, which could cost a lot of gas. But I still want to test out the estimate gas cost, then decide if I should maintain the design or not.

function giveAwayDividend(uint amount) onlyOwner payable {
for(uint i=0;i<size();i++){
    customerAddress[i].call.value((balances[customerAddress[i]] * amount * 100) / totalSupply)();
}}

If I test out on testnet, I have to manually create over 1 thousand user account and send each of them some token, which seems stupid. Is there a better way to calculate the gas cost? For example, if the cost is linear, I could calculate the cost for one customer then multiple by the number of customers. Question is, I dont think its linear, can someone shed some light on this?

Answer 1

Using Truffle and testrpc. It's actually pretty easy to build a development environment and test different use cases.

For the gas estimation, it's mostly based on Web3 native functions:

1. You can retrieve the gas price (in wei) using web3.eth.getGasPrice

2. The function estimateGas will give the gas estimation for a function (with the parameters passed)

3. Multiply number of gas by gas price to get the gas cost estimation.

For example

var TestContract = artifacts.require("./Test.sol");

// Run unit tests to populate my contract
// ...
// ...

// getGasPrice returns the gas price on the current network
TestContract.web3.eth.getGasPrice(function(error, result){ 
    var gasPrice = Number(result);
    console.log("Gas Price is " + gasPrice + " wei"); // "10000000000000"

    // Get Contract instance
    TestContract.deployed().then(function(instance) {

        // Use the keyword 'estimateGas' after the function name to get the gas estimation for this particular function 
        return instance.giveAwayDividend.estimateGas(1);

    }).then(function(result) {
        var gas = Number(result);

        console.log("gas estimation = " + gas + " units");
        console.log("gas cost estimation = " + (gas * gasPrice) + " wei");
        console.log("gas cost estimation = " + TestContract.web3.fromWei((gas * gasPrice), 'ether') + " ether");
    });
});

Result in my case (private network):

> truffle test
Using network 'test'.

Compiling .\contracts\Migrations.sol...
Compiling .\contracts\Test.sol...

Gas Price is 20000000000 wei
gas estimation = 26794 units
gas cost estimation = 535880000000000 wei
gas cost estimation = 0.00053588 ether

Answer 2

The answer provided by Greg Jeanmart perfectly explained how to estimate the gas cost for a function. Here I want to point out that the design of your function giveAwayDividend() might be vulnerable to attack.

Since each of the for loop is paying ether to a user, and it only executes the next loop after this payment is successfully sent, it could be the case where the user at customerAddress[0] refuse the payment (they can do it by having a contract whose fallback function deliberately fails), then your function giveAwayDividend() would then also fail each time, and thus become uncallable.

A better approach could be having users to call a withdraw() function, so the fund only goes to their address when the users request it. This way attackers can only make the function invalid for their account and won't affect anyone else.