Python speed testing - Time Difference - milliseconds

Question

datetime.timedelta is just the difference between two datetimes ... so it's like a period of time, in days / seconds / microseconds

>>> import datetime
>>> a = datetime.datetime.now()
>>> b = datetime.datetime.now()
>>> c = b - a

>>> c
datetime.timedelta(0, 4, 316543)
>>> c.days
0
>>> c.seconds
4
>>> c.microseconds
316543

Be aware that c.microseconds only returns the microseconds portion of the timedelta! For timing purposes always use c.total_seconds().

You can do all sorts of maths with datetime.timedelta, eg:

>>> c / 10
datetime.timedelta(0, 0, 431654)

It might be more useful to look at CPU time instead of wallclock time though ... that's operating system dependant though ... under Unix-like systems, check out the 'time' command.

Since Python 2.7 there's the timedelta.total_seconds() method. So, to get the elapsed milliseconds:

>>> import datetime
>>> a = datetime.datetime.now()
>>> b = datetime.datetime.now()
>>> delta = b - a
>>> print delta
0:00:05.077263
>>> int(delta.total_seconds() * 1000) # milliseconds
5077

You might want to use the timeit module instead.

I know this is late, but I actually really like using:

import time
start = time.time()

##### your timed code here ... #####

print "Process time: " + (time.time() - start)

time.time() gives you seconds since the epoch. Because this is a standardized time in seconds, you can simply subtract the start time from the end time to get the process time (in seconds). time.clock() is good for benchmarking, but I have found it kind of useless if you want to know how long your process took. For example, it's much more intuitive to say "my process takes 10 seconds" than it is to say "my process takes 10 processor clock units"

>>> start = time.time(); sum([each**8.3 for each in range(1,100000)]) ; print (time.time() - start)
3.4001404476250935e+45
0.0637760162354
>>> start = time.clock(); sum([each**8.3 for each in range(1,100000)]) ; print (time.clock() - start)
3.4001404476250935e+45
0.05

In the first example above, you are shown a time of 0.05 for time.clock() vs 0.06377 for time.time()

>>> start = time.clock(); time.sleep(1) ; print "process time: " + (time.clock() - start)
process time: 0.0
>>> start = time.time(); time.sleep(1) ; print "process time: " + (time.time() - start)
process time: 1.00111794472

In the second example, somehow the processor time shows "0" even though the process slept for a second. time.time() correctly shows a little more than 1 second.

You could also use:

import time

start = time.clock()
do_something()
end = time.clock()
print "%.2gs" % (end-start)

Or you could use the python profilers.