How do I get time of a Python program's execution?

The simplest way in Python:

import time
start_time = time.time()
main()
print("--- %s seconds ---" % (time.time() - start_time))

This assumes that your program takes at least a tenth of second to run.

Prints:

--- 0.764891862869 seconds ---

In Linux or Unix:

$ time python yourprogram.py

In Windows, see this StackOverflow question: How do I measure execution time of a command on the Windows command line?

For more verbose output,

$ time -v python yourprogram.py
    Command being timed: "python3 yourprogram.py"
    User time (seconds): 0.08
    System time (seconds): 0.02
    Percent of CPU this job got: 98%
    Elapsed (wall clock) time (h:mm:ss or m:ss): 0:00.10
    Average shared text size (kbytes): 0
    Average unshared data size (kbytes): 0
    Average stack size (kbytes): 0
    Average total size (kbytes): 0
    Maximum resident set size (kbytes): 9480
    Average resident set size (kbytes): 0
    Major (requiring I/O) page faults: 0
    Minor (reclaiming a frame) page faults: 1114
    Voluntary context switches: 0
    Involuntary context switches: 22
    Swaps: 0
    File system inputs: 0
    File system outputs: 0
    Socket messages sent: 0
    Socket messages received: 0
    Signals delivered: 0
    Page size (bytes): 4096
    Exit status: 0

I put this timing.py module into my own site-packages directory, and just insert import timing at the top of my module:

import atexit
from time import clock

def secondsToStr(t):
    return "%d:%02d:%02d.%03d" % \
        reduce(lambda ll,b : divmod(ll[0],b) + ll[1:],
            [(t*1000,),1000,60,60])

line = "="*40
def log(s, elapsed=None):
    print line
    print secondsToStr(clock()), '-', s
    if elapsed:
        print "Elapsed time:", elapsed
    print line
    print

def endlog():
    end = clock()
    elapsed = end-start
    log("End Program", secondsToStr(elapsed))

def now():
    return secondsToStr(clock())

start = clock()
atexit.register(endlog)
log("Start Program")

I can also call timing.log from within my program if there are significant stages within the program I want to show. But just including import timing will print the start and end times, and overall elapsed time. (Forgive my obscure secondsToStr function, it just formats a floating point number of seconds to hh:mm:ss.sss form.)

Note: A Python 3 version of the above code can be found here or here.

import time

start_time = time.clock()
main()
print(time.clock() - start_time, "seconds")

time.clock() returns the processor time, which allows us to calculate only the time used by this process (on Unix anyway). The documentation says "in any case, this is the function to use for benchmarking Python or timing algorithms"