Profiling weirdness: Timer.timeit(), fibonacci and memoization

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 03 Aug 2008 09:46:45 -0500, Rob Williscroft wrote:

> Steven D'Aprano wrote in news:00a529cc$0$20316$c3e8da3 at news.astraweb.com
> in comp.lang.python:
> 
>>> So the question is: whats going on with timeit.Timer ?
>> 
>> As far as I can see, nothing. I think you have misunderstood the
>> results you got.
> 
> No, the answer is that is it repeats a million times.  It might better
> be called repeat_one_million_times().

But that would be seriously broken if you call it like this:

Timer.repeat_one_million_times(5, 1000)

It doesn't repeat one million times. It repeats five times, of 1000 loops 
each.


> Or put another way, myself and the OP misinterpreted what the call
> t1.repeat( number = 1 ) did.
>
> its a confusing API.

There's certainly confusion happening. Perhaps reading the doc strings 
might clear up some confusion? help(Timer.repeat) and help(Timer.timeit) 
state very clearly that they default to one million iterations.


> For the OP:
> 
> The call t1.timeit() is equivalent to t1.repeat( number = 1000000 ).

No it isn't. Try running the code and looking at the results it gives.

t1.repeat(number=10**6) returns a list of three numbers. The function is 
called *three* million times in total.

t1.timeit() returns a single number.

In fact, t1.timeit() is equivalent to 
t1.repeat(repeat=1, number=1000000), (apart from it being in a list). 
That can be written more simply as: t1.repeat(1)


-- 
Steven