Timing how long it takes for subprocess to complete

Question

I currently have a method that executes other python scripts by using subprocess calls, I was wondering if there was anyway I could time how long it takes for this to complete? The scripts are running in an interval, what I want to achieve from this is to check whether the scripts finish within that interval.

def execute_scripts(script_name):
    process = sp.Popen(['python2.7', script_name])
    print 'executing - ' + script_name

Answer 1

Use timeit to time the execution of small bits of code.

#sleep2.py
import time
time.sleep(2)

You need to use subprocess.call to block until the call is finished.

import timeit
import subprocess as sp

def execute_scripts(script_name):
    process = sp.call(['python2.7', script_name])
    print 'executing - ' + script_name

t = timeit.Timer("execute_scripts('sleep2.py')", setup="from __main__ import execute_scripts")


print 'time taken : %f seconds' % t.timeit(1)


executing - sleep2.py
time taken : 2.032273 seconds

Alternatively, you can generalise this by writing a decorator to time any function call

import time
import  subprocess as sp

def timed_execution(function):
    def wrapper(arg):
        t1 = time.time()
        function(arg)
        t2 = time.time()
        return 'time taken : %f seconds' % (t2 - t1) + "\n"
   return wrapper


@timed_execution
def execute_scripts(script_name):
    sp.call(['python2.7', script_name])
    print 'executing - ' + script_name


print execute_scripts('sleep2.py')

executing - sleep2.py
time taken : 2.025291 seconds