Python Timer

If you are looking for an easy way to measure the time that some piece of code takes to execute, you can use the time module from Python. However, it can be cumbersome to write the necessary boilerplate code to start and stop the timer. That's where the Timer class comes in.

The Timer Class

The Timer class is part of the timeit module, which is a module specialized in measuring the execution time of code snippets. To use the Timer class, you need to first import it:

from timeit import Timer

The Timer class takes as input a string that contains the code to be measured. For example, if you want to measure the execution time of a function called my_function, you can create a Timer instance like this:

t = Timer("my_function()", "from __main__ import my_function")

In the second argument of the Timer constructor, you need to specify the context in which the code will be executed. In this example, we are telling the Timer class to import the my_function function from the __main__ module.

To start the timer, you can call the timeit method:

execution_time = t.timeit(number=1000)

The timeit method returns the execution time of the code snippet in seconds. In this example, we are asking the timeit method to execute the code 1000 times.

Example

Here is an example that demonstrates the usage of the Timer class:

from timeit import Timer

def my_function():
    # Code to be measured
    pass

t = Timer("my_function()", "from __main__ import my_function")
execution_time = t.timeit(number=1000)

print("Execution time:", execution_time)

Conclusion

The Timer class is a convenient way to measure the execution time of small code snippets. However, if you want to measure the performance of an entire application, you should use a profiler instead.