Simple way to measure cell execution time in ipython notebook

I would like to get the time spent on the cell execution in addition to the original output from cell.

To this end, I tried %%timeit -r1 -n1 but it doesn't expose the variable defined within cell.

%%time works for cell which only contains 1 statement.

In[1]: %%time
       1
CPU times: user 4 µs, sys: 0 ns, total: 4 µs
Wall time: 5.96 µs
Out[1]: 1

In[2]: %%time
       # Notice there is no out result in this case.
       x = 1
       x
CPU times: user 3 µs, sys: 0 ns, total: 3 µs
Wall time: 5.96 µs

What's the best way to do it?

Update

I have been using Execute Time in Nbextension for quite some time now. It is great.

Update 2021-03

As of now, this is the correct answer. Essentially, %%time and %%timeit both now work as one would expect.


The only way I found to overcome this problem is by executing the last statement with print.

Do not forget that cell magic starts with %% and line magic starts with %.

%%time
clf = tree.DecisionTreeRegressor().fit(X_train, y_train)
res = clf.predict(X_test)
print(res)

Notice that any changes performed inside the cell are not taken into consideration in the next cells, something that is counter intuitive when there is a pipeline: an example


An easier way is to use ExecuteTime plugin in jupyter_contrib_nbextensions package.

pip install jupyter_contrib_nbextensions
jupyter contrib nbextension install --user
jupyter nbextension enable execute_time/ExecuteTime

%time and %timeit now come part of ipython's built-in magic commands


Use cell magic and this project on github by Phillip Cloud:

Load it by putting this at the top of your notebook or put it in your config file if you always want to load it by default:

%install_ext https://raw.github.com/cpcloud/ipython-autotime/master/autotime.py
%load_ext autotime

If loaded, every output of subsequent cell execution will include the time in min and sec it took to execute it.


import time
start = time.time()
"the code you want to test stays here"
end = time.time()
print(end - start)