To get the elapsed time in seconds, you can use timeit.default_timer():

import timeit
start_time = timeit.default_timer()
# code you want to evaluate
elapsed = timeit.default_timer() - start_time

timeit.default_timer() is used instead of time.time() or time.clock() because it will choose the timing function that has the higher resolution for any platform.

I always use a decorator to do some extra work for a existing function, including to get the execution time. It is pythonic and simple.

import time


def time_usage(func):
def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):
beg_ts = time.time()
retval = func(*args, **kwargs)
end_ts = time.time()
print("elapsed time: %f" % (end_ts - beg_ts))
return retval
return wrapper


@time_usage
def test():
for i in xrange(0, 10000):
pass


if __name__ == "__main__":
test()

You can achieve this through the Context Manager, for example:

from contextlib import contextmanager
import time
import logging
@contextmanager
def _log_time_usage(prefix=""):
'''log the time usage in a code block
prefix: the prefix text to show
'''
start = time.time()
try:
yield
finally:
end = time.time()
elapsed_seconds = float("%.2f" % (end - start))
logging.debug('%s: elapsed seconds: %s', prefix, elapsed_seconds)

use example:

with _log_time_usage("sleep 1: "):
time.sleep(1)

I found myself solving this problem again and again, so I finally created a library for it. Install with pip install timer_cm. Then:

from time import sleep
from timer_cm import Timer


with Timer('Long task') as timer:
with timer.child('First step'):
sleep(1)
for _ in range(5):
with timer.child('Baby steps'):
sleep(.5)

Output:

Long task: 3.520s
Baby steps: 2.518s (71%)
First step: 1.001s (28%)

There is one more option which i loves a lot now for simplicity - ipython. In ipython you got a lot of useful stuff plus:

%time <expression> - to get straight cpu and wall time on expression

%timeit <expression> - to get cpu and wall time in a loop of expression

Python 3 - Simple solution using standard library

Option 1: Triple quote the code

import inspect
import timeit




code_block = inspect.cleandoc("""
base = 123456789
exponent = 100
return base ** exponent
""")
print(f'\Code block: {timeit.timeit(code_block, number=1, globals=globals())} elapsed seconds')

inspect.cleandoc handles the removal of extra tabs and whitespace so that blocks of code can be copied and pasted without getting indentation errors.

Option 2: Place code block in a function

import timeit




def my_function():
base = 123456789
exponent = 100
return base ** exponent




if __name__ == '__main__':
print(f'With lambda wrapper: {timeit.timeit(lambda: my_function(), number=1)} elapsed seconds')

Note that a function call will add additional execution time versus timing the function body directly.