Measure Execution Time of Python Code

In this article we’re going to learn how to calculate the execution time of your Python code with different approaches in Python.

For example, we need to test the speed of code snippet below:

total = 0.0 
for i in range(1000000):
    total += i^2

Approach 1 - Using timeit module

With small code snippets we can use timeit module.

import timeit 

code_to_measure = """
total = 0.0 
for i in range(1000000):
    total += i^2
"""
elapsed_time = timeit.timeit(code_to_measure, number=1)

print(elapsed_time)

0.1477892

Approach 2 - Using time module

With larger code snippets to measure, it is harder to input it as a string then you can use time as below example.

import time 

start_time = time.time()

total = 0.0 
for i in range(1000000):
    total += i^2

end_time = time.time()

print(end_time - start_time)

0.20245814323425293