Python: time.monotonic(): Get monotonic time

Some times you want to calculate total elapased time for your program (or) a particular method. Common mistake coders do while calculating method execution time is by using ‘time.time()’.

import time

def processData():
    sum=0
    for i in range(100000000):
        sum*=i

if __name__=="__main__":
    startTime=time.time()
    processData()
    endTime=time.time()
    print("Total time taken is", (endTime-startTime))

Output

Total time taken is 5.8600099086761475

One problem with time.time() is it depends on system time. What if some body change the system time during the execution of method, obviously you will get wrong results. So we require a way to safely measure elapsed time in a program, that doesn’t depend on the system time.

Better alternative is to use time.monotonic() method (doesn’t depends on system clock), which return the value (in fractional seconds) of a monotonic clock, i.e. a clock that cannot go backwards.

import time

def processData():
    sum=0
    for i in range(100000000):
        sum*=i

if __name__=="__main__":
    startTime=time.monotonic()
    processData()
    endTime=time.monotonic()
    print("Total time taken is", (endTime-startTime))

Output

Total time taken is 5.917623278015526

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