IPython: How to save timeit values for each iteration

Question

I'm new to Python and trying to plot the computational speeds of two functions. For example, having defining two functions (see below), how can I return the time for each iteration using the timeit function in IPython/Jupyter?

def func1(x) : 
    return x*x
def func2(x) :
    return x+x
%timeit for x in range(100) : func1(x)
%timeit for x in range(100) : func2(x)

I read https://ipython.org/ipython-doc/3/interactive/magics.html that I can use '-o' to "return a TimeitResult that can be stored in a variable to inspect the result in more details."

But how do I save it to a variable say 'func1_time' and how can I read the time for each iteration? My goal is to plot x vs time for both functions.

Any help will be much appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

You simply do the following:

func1_time = %timeit -o func1(10)

You can access the timing for each iteration by

func1_time.timings

and total time taken for each loop by

func1_time.all_runs

Note that your loops are unneccessary, since %timeit executes your code N times in a loop and iterates this loop r times.

---

Update

If you need the timings for different argumets x, you may try the following:

func1_time = []
for i in [10, 100, 1000]:
    foo =  %timeit -o func1(x)
    func1_time.append(foo)

Then func1_time[0].timings holds the timings for func1(10).

If you do so, I recommend specifying the r and N options, since %timeit adapts the number of loops to the complexity of the problem. The means, the longer it takes to execute a function on time, the fewer loops are run.