Execution time using time.time() in Python

Question

I wrote some code for a HackerRank problem ( https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/acm-icpc-team ).

import time
from itertools import combinations

start_time = time.time()

n,m = raw_input().strip().split(' ') # n = no of people and m = no of topics
n,m = [int(n),int(m)]
topic = []
topic_i = 0
for topic_i in xrange(n):
   topic_t = str(raw_input().strip())
   topic.append(topic_t)    # populate the topic[] list with the topics

counts = []
for list1, list2 in combinations(topic, 2):
   if list1 != list2:
      count = 0
      for i in xrange(m):
        if int(list1[i]) | int(list2[i]):
            count += 1
      counts.append(count)

print max(counts)
print counts.count(max(counts))

print time.time() - start_time

When I try to run the code, I get an execution time of 8.37576699257 seconds. But my program got over in a jiffy. I have read that the timeit() function, by default, runs the function passed to it a million times. Does something similar happen here?

Answer 1

You counted the time when the program waited for the user input too. You may want to move the first time.time() invocation below raw_input() .