Python resolution of datetime.now()

Question

from datetime import datetime
import time
for i in range(1000):
    curr_time  = datetime.now()
    print(curr_time)
    time.sleep(0.0001)

I was t

Answer 1

This may be a limitation of time.sleep on your system, rather than datetime.now()... or possibly both. What OS and what version and distribution of Python are you running on?

Your system may not offer the "subsecond precision" mentioned in the time.sleep docs:

sleep(...)
    sleep(seconds)

    Delay execution for a given number of seconds.  The argument may be
    a floating point number for subsecond precision.

On Linux 3.x on amd64 with CPython 2.7, I get something pretty close to the 0.0001 time steps that you intended:

2015-07-10 19:58:24.353711
2015-07-10 19:58:24.353879
2015-07-10 19:58:24.354052
2015-07-10 19:58:24.354227
2015-07-10 19:58:24.354401
2015-07-10 19:58:24.354577
2015-07-10 19:58:24.354757
2015-07-10 19:58:24.354938