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Python 201 - Interactively Learn Advanced Concepts in Python 3

Use a decorator

Explore how to write a custom timing decorator and create a timing context manager in Python. Understand how to measure function run times effectively, useful for benchmarking slow-running tasks such as database queries or network requests.

We'll cover the following...

Writing our own timer is a lot of fun too, although it may not be as accurate as just using timeit depending on the use case. Regardless, we’re going to write our own custom function timing decorator! Here’s the code:

Python 3.5
import random
import time
def timerfunc(func):
    """
    A timer decorator
    """
    def function_timer(*args, **kwargs):
        """
        A nested function for timing other functions
        """
        start = time.time()
        value = func(*args, **kwargs)
        end = time.time()
        runtime = end - start
        msg = "The runtime for {func} took {time} seconds to complete"
        print(msg.format(func=func.__name__,
                         time=runtime))
        return value
    return function_timer
@timerfunc
def long_runner():
    for x in range(5):
        sleep_time = random.choice(range(1,5))
        time.sleep(sleep_time)
if __name__ == '__main__':
    long_runner()

For this example, we import the random and the time modules from Python’s standard library (Lines 1-2). Then we create our decorator ...