What exactly are fractional seconds returned by Python time.perf_counter()?
Question:
This is probably a dumb/obvious question, but just want to make sure my hunches are correct.
I’m doing some basic performance timing in a Python3 script using time.perf_counter() like so:
start = time.perf_counter()
# some time consuming operation here
end = time.perf_counter()
elapsed = end - start
And I’ll get back values like 9.774 or 36.903 (to many more decimal places, of course). I’m assuming that larger numbers = more time elapsed, but what exactly do these numbers mean? E.g. is 1.23 fractional seconds just 1 second and .23 fractions of a second
Answers:
As far as I know, “fractional second” just means a second with a fractional part (as opposed to a strictly integer number of seconds). So 9.774 means 9 seconds plus 774/1000 seconds.
Additional info, for very small elapsed time it will return scientific notation like 3.6564000765793025e-05 then to format it to second and Milisecond/Microsecond
print(f'{elapsed:.3f} - Second & MiliSecond')
print(f'{elapsed:.6f} - Second & Microsecond')
# 0.000 - Second & MiliSecond
# 0.000037 - Second & Microsecond
This is probably a dumb/obvious question, but just want to make sure my hunches are correct.
I’m doing some basic performance timing in a Python3 script using time.perf_counter() like so:
start = time.perf_counter()
# some time consuming operation here
end = time.perf_counter()
elapsed = end - start
And I’ll get back values like 9.774 or 36.903 (to many more decimal places, of course). I’m assuming that larger numbers = more time elapsed, but what exactly do these numbers mean? E.g. is 1.23 fractional seconds just 1 second and .23 fractions of a second
As far as I know, “fractional second” just means a second with a fractional part (as opposed to a strictly integer number of seconds). So 9.774 means 9 seconds plus 774/1000 seconds.
Additional info, for very small elapsed time it will return scientific notation like 3.6564000765793025e-05 then to format it to second and Milisecond/Microsecond
print(f'{elapsed:.3f} - Second & MiliSecond')
print(f'{elapsed:.6f} - Second & Microsecond')
# 0.000 - Second & MiliSecond
# 0.000037 - Second & Microsecond