Get time of execution of a block of code in Python 2.7

Question

I would like to measure the time elapsed to evaluate a block of code in a Python program, possibly separating between user cpu time, system cpu time and elapsed time.

I know the timeit module, but I have many self-written functions and it is not very easy to pass them in the setup process.

I would rather have something that could be used like:

#up to here I have done something.... start_counting() #or whatever command used to mark that I want to measure                    #the time elapsed in the next rows # code I want to evaluate user,system,elapsed = stop_counting() #or whatever command says:                                       #stop the timer and return the times 

The user and system CPU times are not essential (though I would like to measure them), but for the elapsed time I would like to be able to do something like this, rather than using complicated commands or modules.

Answer 1

To get the elapsed time in seconds, you can use timeit.default_timer():

import timeit start_time = timeit.default_timer() # code you want to evaluate elapsed = timeit.default_timer() - start_time 

timeit.default_timer() is used instead of time.time() or time.clock() because it will choose the timing function that has the higher resolution for any platform.

Answer 2

I always use a decorator to do some extra work for a existing function, including to get the execution time. It is pythonic and simple.

import time  def time_usage(func):     def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):         beg_ts = time.time()         retval = func(*args, **kwargs)         end_ts = time.time()         print("elapsed time: %f" % (end_ts - beg_ts))         return retval     return wrapper  @time_usage def test():     for i in xrange(0, 10000):         pass  if __name__ == "__main__":     test()