Python Program to Measure the Elapsed Time in Python
Tags: python, programming, codenewbie, tutorial
Published: 2021-09-28 08:49:43

---
title: Python Program to Measure the Elapsed Time in Python
published: true
date: 2021-09-26 15:22:42 UTC
tags: #python #programming #codenewbie #tutorial
canonical_url: https://itsmycode.com/python-program-to-measure-the-elapsed-time-in-python/
---

ItsMyCode |

There are multiple ways to measure the elapsed time in Python. The modules that are available are  **time** ,  **timeit** , and  **Datetime ** to measure elapsed time.

## Using time Module

We can use the time module to calculate the time elapsed in executing a code or a method depending on your need. There are four steps involved to measure the time elapsed while executing the code in the time module.

**Step 1:**  Import the time module

**Step 2:**  Save the time stamp to the variable at the begining of the code execution using the **`time.perf_counter()`** function

**Step 3:**  Save the time stamp to the variable at the end of the code executing using the **`time.perf_counter()`** function

**Step 4:**  Print the difference between the end and start times to get the actual execution time.

**Example of using time Module**

```Python
# import time module
import time

# start the time and capture it in a variable
start = time.perf_counter()

# Program to read the entire file (absolute path) using read() function
with open("C:/Projects/Tryouts/python.txt", "r") as file:
    content = file.read()
    print(content)
    file.close()

# capture the end time and store it in a variable
end = time.perf_counter()

print('The total time taken to execute code is ', end - start)

```

**Output**

```Python
Hello
Welcome to Python Tutorial
Cheers
Appending the content
Python

The total time taken to execute code is 0.05468999221
```

## Using timeit Module

The **`timeit `** module is often used to measure the elapsed time of smaller code snippets. We can also use the **`timeit()`** function, which executes the anonymous function with several executions.

```Python
# import timeit module
import timeit

# start the time and capture it in a variable
start = timeit.default_timer()

# Program to read the entire file (absolute path) using read() function
with open("C:/Projects/Tryouts/python.txt", "r") as file:
    content = file.read()
    print(content)
    file.close()

# capture the end time and store it in a variable
end = timeit.default_timer()

print('The total time taken to execute code is ', end - start)

```

**Output**

```Python
Hello
Welcome to Python Tutorial
Cheers
Appending the content
Python

The total time taken to execute code is 0.005783799999999999
```

The **`timeit.timeit()`** function can take another function as an argument, and it can execute the method multiple times by specifying the value into the number argument.

```Python
# import timeit module
from os import read
from time import sleep
import timeit

def readfile():
    sleep(2)
    # Program to read the entire file (absolute path) using read() function
    with open("C:/Projects/Tryouts/python.txt", "r") as file:
        content = file.read()
        file.close()
    return content

t = timeit.timeit(lambda: readfile(), number=10)

print('The total time taken to execute code is ', t)

```

**Output**

```Python
The total time taken to execute code is 20.1075041
```

Usually, to calculate the performance, we need to execute the code multiple times and get the average performance. We can acheive it using **`timeit.repeat()`** function as shown below.

```Python
# import timeit module
from os import read
from time import sleep
import timeit

def readfile():
    sleep(1)
    # Program to read the entire file (absolute path) using read() function
    with open("C:/Projects/Tryouts/python.txt", "r") as file:
        content = file.read()
        file.close()
    return content

t = timeit.repeat(lambda: readfile(), number=10, repeat=5)

print('The total time taken to execute code is ', t)

```

**Output**

```Python
The total time taken to execute code is [10.1566243, 10.102775400000002, 10.128235400000001, 10.065340800000001, 10.076453699999995]
```

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