time.time or time.clock

[Ron Adam]

Fredrik Lundh wrote:
> John Machin wrote:
> 
>> AFAICT that was enough indication for most people to use time.clock on
>> all platforms ...
> 
> which was unfortunate, given that time.clock() isn't even a proper clock 
> on most Unix systems; it's a low-resolution sample counter that can 
> happily assign all time to a process that uses, say, 2% CPU and zero 
> time to one that uses 98% CPU.
> 
>  > before the introduction of the timeit module; have you considered it?
> 
> whether or not "timeit" suites his requirements, he can at least replace 
> his code with
> 
>      clock = timeit.default_timer
> 
> which returns a good wall-time clock (which happens to be time.time() on 
> Unix and time.clock() on Windows).


Thanks for the suggestion Fredrik, I looked at timeit and it does the 
following.


import sys
import time

if sys.platform == "win32":
     # On Windows, the best timer is time.clock()
     default_timer = time.clock
else:
     # On most other platforms the best timer is time.time()
     default_timer = time.time



I was hoping I could determine which to use by the values returned.  But 
maybe that isn't as easy as it seems it would be.


Ron