[IronPython] time module

Dino Viehland dinov at exchange.microsoft.com
Fri Apr 28 17:27:19 CEST 2006


Yes, it should be possible - .NET provides us the Stopwatch class for this reason in 2.0.  I've opened a beta 7 bug for this.

Do you want to help develop Dynamic languages on CLR? (http://members.microsoft.com/careers/search/details.aspx?JobID=6D4754DE-11F0-45DF-8B78-DC1B43134038)

-----Original Message-----
From: users-bounces at lists.ironpython.com [mailto:users-bounces at lists.ironpython.com] On Behalf Of Michael Foord
Sent: Friday, April 28, 2006 2:10 AM
To: Discussion of IronPython
Subject: [IronPython] time module

Hello all,

I was surprised to note that the IronPython module provides dramatically
less resolution than the cPython equivalent.

Both ``time.time()`` and ``time.clock()`` provide a resolution of only
tenths of a second.

This module is obviously heavily dependent on the underlying platform.
In fact the standard Python docs warn, of ``time.time`` :


    Return the time as a floating point number expressed in seconds
    since the epoch, in UTC. Note that even though the time is always
    returned as a floating point number, not all systems provide time
    with a better precision than 1 second. While this function normally
    returns non-decreasing values, it can return a lower value than a
    previous call if the system clock has been set back between the two
    calls.


*However*, of ``time.clock()``, the docs say :

    On Unix, return the current processor time as a floating point
number expressed in seconds. The precision, and in fact the very
definition of the meaning of ``processor time'', depends on that of the
C function of the same name, but in any case, this is the function to
use for benchmarking Python or timing algorithms.

    On Windows, this function returns wall-clock seconds elapsed since
the first call to this function, as a floating point number, based on
the Win32 function QueryPerformanceCounter(). The resolution is
typically better than one microsecond.

This means that ``time.clock()`` no longer functions usefully, or as
described in the docs.

For our profiling we started to use ``System.DateTime.Now``, but
discovered this had a resolution of about 15ms. This was too small an
increment for measuring some of our recursive functions.

We ended up using ``QueryPerformanceCounter`` from C# [#]_. Would it be
possible to re-implement ``time.clock`` so that it is useful ?

Michael Foord


.. [#] See the following page for basically full code to do this,
http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/highperformancetimercshar.asp





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