Question

i have two modules: moduleParent and moduleChild

i’m doing something like this in moduleParent:

import moduleChild

#a bunch of code

start = time.time()
moduleChild.childFunction()
finish = time.time()
print "calling child function takes:", finish-start, "total seconds"

#a bunch of code

i’m doing something like this in moduleChild:

def childFunction():
    start = time.time()
    #a bunch of code
    finish = time.time()
    print "child function says it takes:", finish-start, "total seconds"

the output looks like this:

calling child function takes: .24 total seconds
child function says it takes: 0.0 total seconds

so my question is, where are these .24 extra seconds coming from?

thank you for your expertise.

#

here is the actual code for “childFuntion”. it really shouldn’t take .24 seconds.

 def getResources(show, resourceName='', resourceType=''):
   '''
   get a list of resources with the given name

   @show: show name
   @resourceName: name of resource
   @resourceType: type of resource
   @return: list of resource dictionaries
   '''

   t1 = time.time()

   cmd = r'C:\tester.exe -cmdFile "C:\%s\info.txt" -user root -pwd root'%show
   cmd += " -cmd findResources -machineFormatted "

   if resourceName:
       cmd += '-name %s'%resourceName

   if resourceType:
       cmd += '_' + resourceType.replace(".", "_") + "_"

   proc=subprocess.Popen(cmd, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
   output = proc.stdout.read()
   output = output.strip()

   resourceData = output.split("\r\n")
   resourceData = resourceData[1:]

   resourceList = []
   for data in resourceData:
       resourceId, resourceName, resourceType = data.split("|")
       rTyp = "_" + resourceType.replace(".", "_") + "_"
       shot, assetName = resourceName.split(rTyp)
       resourceName = assetName
       path = '//projects/%s/scenes/%s/%s/%s'%(show, shot, resourceType.replace(".", "/"), assetName)
       resourceDict = {'id':resourceId, 'name':resourceName, 'type':resourceType, 'path':path }
       resourceList.append(resourceDict)

   t2 = time.time()
   print ("     ", t2 - t2, "seconds")


   return resourceList

Answer 1

Edit 2: I just noticed a typo in child function, you have t2 – t2 in the print statement

ignore below:

Calling the function itself has overhead (setting up stack space, saving local variables, returning, etc). The result suggests that your function is so trivial that setting up for a function call took longer than running the code itself.

Edit: also, calling the timers as well as print ads overhead. Now that I think about it, calling print could account for a lot of that .24 seconds. IO is slow.