How do you calculate program run time in python?

Quick alternative

import timeit

start = timeit.default_timer()

#Your statements here

stop = timeit.default_timer()

print('Time: ', stop - start)  

You might want to take a look at the timeit module:

http://docs.python.org/library/timeit.html

or the profile module:

http://docs.python.org/library/profile.html

There are some additionally some nice tutorials here:

http://www.doughellmann.com/PyMOTW/profile/index.html

http://www.doughellmann.com/PyMOTW/timeit/index.html

And the time module also might come in handy, although I prefer the later two recommendations for benchmarking and profiling code performance:

http://docs.python.org/library/time.html

@JoshAdel covered a lot of it, but if you just want to time the execution of an entire script, you can run it under time on a unix-like system.

kotai:~ chmullig$ cat sleep.py 
import time

print "presleep"
time.sleep(10)
print "post sleep"
kotai:~ chmullig$ python sleep.py 
presleep
post sleep
kotai:~ chmullig$ time python sleep.py 
presleep
post sleep

real    0m10.035s
user    0m0.017s
sys 0m0.016s
kotai:~ chmullig$ 

see this: Python - time.clock() vs. time.time() - accuracy?