How do I get time of a Python program's execution?

The simplest way in Python:

import time
start_time = time.time()
main()
print("--- %s seconds ---" % (time.time() - start_time))

This assumes that your program takes at least a tenth of second to run.

Prints:

--- 0.764891862869 seconds ---

I put this timing.py module into my own site-packages directory, and just insert import timing at the top of my module:

import atexit
from time import clock

def secondsToStr(t):
    return "%d:%02d:%02d.%03d" % \
        reduce(lambda ll,b : divmod(ll[0],b) + ll[1:],
            [(t*1000,),1000,60,60])

line = "="*40
def log(s, elapsed=None):
    print line
    print secondsToStr(clock()), '-', s
    if elapsed:
        print "Elapsed time:", elapsed
    print line
    print

def endlog():
    end = clock()
    elapsed = end-start
    log("End Program", secondsToStr(elapsed))

def now():
    return secondsToStr(clock())

start = clock()
atexit.register(endlog)
log("Start Program")

I can also call timing.log from within my program if there are significant stages within the program I want to show. But just including import timing will print the start and end times, and overall elapsed time. (Forgive my obscure secondsToStr function, it just formats a floating point number of seconds to hh:mm:ss.sss form.)

Note: A Python 3 version of the above code can be found here or here.

In Linux or Unix:

$ time python yourprogram.py

In Windows, see this StackOverflow question: How do I measure execution time of a command on the Windows command line?

For more verbose output,

$ time -v python yourprogram.py
    Command being timed: "python3 yourprogram.py"
    User time (seconds): 0.08
    System time (seconds): 0.02
    Percent of CPU this job got: 98%
    Elapsed (wall clock) time (h:mm:ss or m:ss): 0:00.10
    Average shared text size (kbytes): 0
    Average unshared data size (kbytes): 0
    Average stack size (kbytes): 0
    Average total size (kbytes): 0
    Maximum resident set size (kbytes): 9480
    Average resident set size (kbytes): 0
    Major (requiring I/O) page faults: 0
    Minor (reclaiming a frame) page faults: 1114
    Voluntary context switches: 0
    Involuntary context switches: 22
    Swaps: 0
    File system inputs: 0
    File system outputs: 0
    Socket messages sent: 0
    Socket messages received: 0
    Signals delivered: 0
    Page size (bytes): 4096
    Exit status: 0