Python in a Nutshell

Name

clock

Synopsis

clock( )

Returns the current CPU time as a floating-point number of seconds. To measure computational costs of different approaches, it is generally better to use the results of time.clock rather than those of time.time. On Unix-like platforms, the reason is that the results of time.clock, using CPU time rather than elapsed time, are less dependent than those of time.time on unpredictable factors due to machine load. On Windows, this reason does not apply, as Windows has no concept of CPU time, but there is another reason: time.clock uses the higher-precision performance counter machine clock. The epoch (the time corresponding to a 0.0 result from time.clock) is arbitrary, but differences between the results of successive calls to time.clock in the same process are accurate.