Python datetime.strptime() Eating lots of CPU Time

Question

I have some log parsing code that needs to turn a timestamp into a datetime object. I am using datetime.strptime but this function is using a lot of cputime according to cPr

Answer 1

What's a "lot of time"? strptime is taking about 30 microseconds here:

from datetime import datetime
import timeit
def f():
    datetime.strptime("01/Nov/2010:07:49:33", "%d/%b/%Y:%H:%M:%S")
n = 100000
print "%.6f" % (timeit.timeit(f, number=n)/n)

prints 0.000031.