All the basic examples for Python's timeit module show strings being executed. This lead to, in my opinion, somewhat convoluted code such as: #! /usr/bin/env python import timeit def f(): pass if __name__ == "__main__": timer = timeit.Timer("__main__.f()", "import __main__") result = timer.repeat(repeat=100, number=100000) print("{:8.6f}".format(min(result))) For some reason, the fact that you can call a function directly is only (again, in my opinion) obscurely Read more [...]