Beyond the Basic Stuff with Python

13 Measuring Performance and Big O Algorithm Analysis

For most small programs, performance isn’t all that important. We might spend an hour writing a script to automate a task that needs only a few seconds to run. Even if it takes longer, the program will probably finish by the time we’ve returned to our desk with a cup of coffee.

Sometimes it’s prudent to invest time in learning how to make a script faster. But we can’t know if our changes improve a program’s speed until we know how to measure program speed. This is where Python’s timeit and cProfile modules come in. These modules not only measure how fast code runs, but also create a profile ...