What's the most efficient way to sleep in Python?

Question

What would be better ?

time.sleep(delayTime)

or

select.select([],[],[],delayTime)

Are they equivalent ? Is select more efficient?

Answer 1

Pretty simple to hackup a test in python with called to timeit, but I love ipython for quick tests (http://ipython.org/). Here's my results:

$ ipython
import time,select

%timeit time.sleep(0)
1000000 loops, best of 3: 655 ns per loop

%timeit select.select([],[],[],0)
1000000 loops, best of 3: 902 ns per loop

But if you don't have access to ipython, and would prefer native timeit from command line:

$ python -m timeit -s "import time,select" "time.sleep(0)"
1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.583 usec per loop

$ python -m timeit -s "import time,select" "select.select([],[],[],0)"
1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.777 usec per loop