26.6. timeit — Measure execution time of small code snippets

New in version 2.3.

This module provides a simple way to time small bits of Python code. It has both command line as well as callable interfaces. It avoids a number of common traps for measuring execution times. See also Tim Peters’ introduction to the “Algorithms” chapter in the Python Cookbook, published by O’Reilly.

The module defines the following public class:

class timeit.Timer([stmt='pass'[, setup='pass'[, timer=<timer function>]]])

Class for timing execution speed of small code snippets.

The constructor takes a statement to be timed, an additional statement used for setup, and a timer function. Both statements default to 'pass'; the timer function is platform-dependent (see the module doc string). stmt and setup may also contain multiple statements separated by ; or newlines, as long as they don’t contain multi-line string literals.

To measure the execution time of the first statement, use the timeit() method. The repeat() method is a convenience to call timeit() multiple times and return a list of results.

Changed in version 2.6: The stmt and setup parameters can now also take objects that are callable without arguments. This will embed calls to them in a timer function that will then be executed by timeit(). Note that the timing overhead is a little larger in this case because of the extra function calls.

Timer.print_exc([file=None])

Helper to print a traceback from the timed code.

Typical use:

t = Timer(...)       # outside the try/except
try:
    t.timeit(...)    # or t.repeat(...)
except:
    t.print_exc()

The advantage over the standard traceback is that source lines in the compiled template will be displayed. The optional file argument directs where the traceback is sent; it defaults to sys.stderr.

Timer.repeat([repeat=3[, number=1000000]])

Call timeit() a few times.

This is a convenience function that calls the timeit() repeatedly, returning a list of results. The first argument specifies how many times to call timeit(). The second argument specifies the number argument for timeit().

Note

It’s tempting to calculate mean and standard deviation from the result vector and report these. However, this is not very useful. In a typical case, the lowest value gives a lower bound for how fast your machine can run the given code snippet; higher values in the result vector are typically not caused by variability in Python’s speed, but by other processes interfering with your timing accuracy. So the min() of the result is probably the only number you should be interested in. After that, you should look at the entire vector and apply common sense rather than statistics.

Timer.timeit([number=1000000])

Time number executions of the main statement. This executes the setup statement once, and then returns the time it takes to execute the main statement a number of times, measured in seconds as a float. The argument is the number of times through the loop, defaulting to one million. The main statement, the setup statement and the timer function to be used are passed to the constructor.

Note

By default, timeit() temporarily turns off garbage collection during the timing. The advantage of this approach is that it makes independent timings more comparable. This disadvantage is that GC may be an important component of the performance of the function being measured. If so, GC can be re-enabled as the first statement in the setup string. For example:

timeit.Timer('for i in xrange(10): oct(i)', 'gc.enable()').timeit()

Starting with version 2.6, the module also defines two convenience functions:

timeit.repeat(stmt[, setup[, timer[, repeat=3[, number=1000000]]]])

Create a Timer instance with the given statement, setup code and timer function and run its repeat() method with the given repeat count and number executions.

New in version 2.6.

timeit.timeit(stmt[, setup[, timer[, number=1000000]]])

Create a Timer instance with the given statement, setup code and timer function and run its timeit() method with number executions.

New in version 2.6.

python -m timeit [-n N] [-r N] [-s S] [-t] [-c] [-h] [statement ...]

% timeit.py 'try:' '  str.__nonzero__' 'except AttributeError:' '  pass'
100000 loops, best of 3: 15.7 usec per loop
% timeit.py 'if hasattr(str, "__nonzero__"): pass'
100000 loops, best of 3: 4.26 usec per loop
% timeit.py 'try:' '  int.__nonzero__' 'except AttributeError:' '  pass'
1000000 loops, best of 3: 1.43 usec per loop
% timeit.py 'if hasattr(int, "__nonzero__"): pass'
100000 loops, best of 3: 2.23 usec per loop

>>> import timeit
>>> s = """\
... try:
...     str.__nonzero__
... except AttributeError:
...     pass
... """
>>> t = timeit.Timer(stmt=s)
>>> print "%.2f usec/pass" % (1000000 * t.timeit(number=100000)/100000)
17.09 usec/pass
>>> s = """\
... if hasattr(str, '__nonzero__'): pass
... """
>>> t = timeit.Timer(stmt=s)
>>> print "%.2f usec/pass" % (1000000 * t.timeit(number=100000)/100000)
4.85 usec/pass
>>> s = """\
... try:
...     int.__nonzero__
... except AttributeError:
...     pass
... """
>>> t = timeit.Timer(stmt=s)
>>> print "%.2f usec/pass" % (1000000 * t.timeit(number=100000)/100000)
1.97 usec/pass
>>> s = """\
... if hasattr(int, '__nonzero__'): pass
... """
>>> t = timeit.Timer(stmt=s)
>>> print "%.2f usec/pass" % (1000000 * t.timeit(number=100000)/100000)
3.15 usec/pass

def test():
    "Stupid test function"
    L = []
    for i in range(100):
        L.append(i)

if __name__=='__main__':
    from timeit import Timer
    t = Timer("test()", "from __main__ import test")
    print t.timeit()