timer - How long does my Python application take to run?

Question

Basically, I want to be able to output the elapsed time that the application is running for. I think I need to use some sort of timeit function but I'm not sure which one. I'm looking for something like the following...

START MY TIMER
code for application
more code
more code
etc
STOP MY TIMER

OUTPUT ELAPSED TIME to do the above code in between start and stop of timer. Thoughts?

Answer 1

The simplest way to do it is to put:

import time
start_time = time.time()

at the start and

print "My program took", time.time() - start_time, "to run"

at the end.