2010/11/2 M.-A. Lemburg mal@egenix.com:
You might want to look at the systimes.py module that comes with pybench (see Tools/pybench). This already provides a cross-platform way of accessing high accuracy timers for benchmarking and the like.
For obvious reasons this tries to measure run-time, though, and not elapsed time.
I think MAL answered the naming question without even realising it:
time.elapsed_time(start_time=0)
Cheers, Nick.