Question

I want to compute how many times my computer can do counter += 1 in one second. A naive approach is the following:

from time import time

counter = 0
startTime = time()

while time() - startTime < 1:
    counter += 1

print counter

The problem is time() - startTime < 1 may be considerably more expensive than counter += 1.

Is there a way to make a less “clean” 1 sec sample of my algorithm?

Answer 1

The usual way to time algorithms is the other way around: Use a fixed number of iterations and measure how long it takes to finish them. The best way to do such timings is the timeit module.

print timeit.timeit("counter += 1", "counter = 0", number=100000000)

Note that timing counter += 1 seems rather pointless, though. What do you want to achieve?