How to find running time of a thread in Python

Question

I have a multi-threaded SMTP server. Each thread takes care of one client. I need to set a timeout value of 10 seconds on each server thread to terminate dormant or misbehaving clients.
I have used the time.time(), to find the start time and my checkpoint time and the difference gives the running time. But I believe it gives the system time and not the time this thread was running.
Is there a Thread local timer API in Python ?

   import threading
   stop = 0

   def hello():
     stop = 1

   t=threading.Timer(10,hello)
   t.start()
   while stop != 1:
      print stop
   print "stop changed"

This prints 0 (initial stop) in a loop and does not come out of the while loop.

Answer 1

Python has progressed in the 6 years since this question was asked, and in version 3.3 it's introduced a tool for exactly what was being asked for here:

time.clock_gettime(time.CLOCK_THREAD_CPUTIME_ID)

Python 3.7 additionally introduced an analogous time.clock_gettime_ns.

Detailed docs are exactly where you'd expect but the feature is pretty straightforward straight out of the box.