Problem with timeit

[Paul Moore]

On 15 December 2017 at 13:25, ast <nomail at com.invalid> wrote:
> On my computer it takes roughtly 4 s, mesured with a watch.

Is your computer particularly old? On my PC, the time it takes to run
x=123456**123456 at the Python interpreter prompt is barely
noticeable.

> I can't do "len(str(x))" to know the size, I have to kill the process

Took a few seconds (5-10s) on my PC, and returned 628578.

> But x.bit_length() answers 2088091, so x should have about
> 600000 digits

Yep, that's what I get

>
> If I measure execution time:
>
>>>> t=time(); x=123456**123456; print(time()-t)
>
> 0.0

Same here.

> There is still something wrong

As far as I can see, it's in your manual measurement. All of the code
you've provided gives the same results on my PC as on yours, but your
manual measurements differ drastically from mine (and my manual
measurements match what I'd expect given results of timeit/time.time
whereas yours don't...).

Paul