Get time of execution of a block of code in Python 2.7

Question

I would like to measure the time elapsed to evaluate a block of code in a Python program, possibly separating between user cpu time, system cpu time and elapsed time.

I know the timeit module, but I have many self-written functions and it is not very easy to pass them in the setup process.

I would rather have something that could be used like:

#up to here I have done something....
start_counting() #or whatever command used to mark that I want to measure
                   #the time elapsed in the next rows
# code I want to evaluate
user,system,elapsed = stop_counting() #or whatever command says:
                                      #stop the timer and return the times

The user and system CPU times are not essential (though I would like to measure them), but for the elapsed time I would like to be able to do something like this, rather than using complicated commands or modules.

Answer 1

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.