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

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.

You can achieve this through the Context Manager, for example:

from contextlib import contextmanager
import time
import logging
@contextmanager
def _log_time_usage(prefix=""):
    '''log the time usage in a code block
    prefix: the prefix text to show
    '''
    start = time.time()
    try:
        yield
    finally:
        end = time.time()
        elapsed_seconds = float("%.2f" % (end - start))
        logging.debug('%s: elapsed seconds: %s', prefix, elapsed_seconds)

use example:

with _log_time_usage("sleep 1: "):
    time.sleep(1)

I always use a decorator to do some extra work for a existing function, including to get the execution time. It is pythonic and simple.

import time

def time_usage(func):
    def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):
        beg_ts = time.time()
        retval = func(*args, **kwargs)
        end_ts = time.time()
        print("elapsed time: %f" % (end_ts - beg_ts))
        return retval
    return wrapper

@time_usage
def test():
    for i in xrange(0, 10000):
        pass

if __name__ == "__main__":
    test()