datetime - 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

Equivalent in python would be:

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

If you are trying to find the best performing method then you should probably have a look at timeit.