[Python-Dev] 3.3 str timings

[Xavier Morel]

On 21 août 2012, at 19:25, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
> On 21/08/12 23:04, Victor Stinner wrote:
> 
>> I don't like the timeit module for micro benchmarks, it is really
>> unstable (default settings are not written for micro benchmarks).
> [...]
>> I wrote my own benchmark tool, based on timeit, to have more stable
>> results on micro benchmarks:
>> https://bitbucket.org/haypo/misc/src/tip/python/benchmark.py
> 
> I am surprised, because the whole purpose of timeit is to time micro
> code snippets.

And when invoked from the command-line, it is already time-based: unless -n is specified, python guesstimates the number of iterations to be a power of 10 resulting in at least 0.2s per test (the repeat defaults to 3 though)

As a side-note, every time I use timeit programmatically, it annoys me that this behavior is not available and has to be implemented manually. 

> If it is as unstable as you suggest, and if you have an alternative
> which is more stable and accurate, I would love to see it in the
> standard library.