Ezio Melotti added the comment: I tried to run those timings again and the values I got from the terminal are close to the ones I got from the interactive interpreter. I'm not sure why when I wrote those examples I got such different values. It would be fine with me to update them and avoid confusion.
In command-line invocation the gc is disabled. And timit.repeat() is used instead of timit.timit().
Looking at the current code it seems to me that the command-line uses timeit.repeat(), that repeat calls timeit.timeit(), and that timeit.timeit() disables the gc. Maybe back then it was different; that would explain why I got different results. ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue18588> _______________________________________