How do you determine a processing time in Python?

Question

I'm new to Python, and confused by the date/time documentation. I want to compute the time that it takes to perform a computation.

In java, I would write:

long timeBefore = System.currentTimeMillis();
doStuff();
long timeAfter = System.currentTimeMillis();
elapsed time = timeAfter - timeBefore;

I'm sure it's even easier in Python. Can anyone help?

Answer 1

python -m timeit -h

Answer 2

Equivalent in python would be:

>>> import time
>>> tic = time.clock()
>>> toc = time.clock()
>>> toc - tic

It's not clear what are you trying to do that for? Are you trying to find the best performing method? Then you should prob have a look at timeit.

Answer 3

Use timeit. http://docs.python.org/library/timeit.html