Python time.process_time() Function

The time.process_time() method returns the time in seconds used by a process since its start. 

The function  measures the time spent on CPU-related tasks, such as calculations and data transfers, but does not include sleep times durations such as the  time taken for  waiting for input, output, or by the time.sleep() function. This can be useful in evaluating the efficiency of different algorithms and to optimize the execution time of the program.

process_time()

The function does not take any argument.

import time

print(time.process_time())

In the above case, the return value 0.515625 indicates that the process has used 0.515625 seconds of CPU time.

Let us see an example with a process which takes a little more time.

import time

for i in range(5000):
    i * 2
    i ** 2

print("process time:  ", time.process_time())

In the above example, we used loops in order to use more processing time without requiring the loop outputs.

The process_time_ns() Function

The process_time_ns() function works just like the process_time() function, the only difference is that  it returns the time taken by a process in nanoseconds instead of seconds.

time.process_time_ns()

import time 

print(time.process_time_ns())

The time.perf_counter() function is similar to the process_time() function except that it measures sleep durations as well.