[Python-Dev] CPU vs Wall time Profiling (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Wed Feb 22 00:30:28 CET 2012

On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 1:00 PM, Sümer Cip <sumerc at gmail.com> wrote:

Is there a reason behind the fact that the Python profilers work with Wall time by default? There are OS-dependent ways to get the CPU time of a thread, and giving that choice to the user somehow ( to use wall vs cpu time) might be a good feature?

The original reason was that the Unix wall clock was more accurate than its CPU clock. If that's changed we should probably (perhaps in a platform-dependent way) change the default to the most accurate clock available.

-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

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