💡 Problem Formulation: Chances are you’ve already figured out that you can get your Python program to sleep for one second using time.sleep(1). But how do you sleep for less than a second, e.g., for half a second (0.5s), milliseconds, or even microseconds?
Method 1: Use time.sleep()
The time.sleep(seconds) function halts the Python program for a specified amount of seconds. You can pass a floating point number for subsecond precision. For example, time.sleep(0.5) sleeps for 0.5 seconds and time.sleep(0.1) sleeps for 100 milliseconds.
import time
print('hello...')
time.sleep(0.5)
print('... world')
The output is first:
hello...… and then 0.5 seconds (500 milliseconds) later:
... world🅰️ Warning: Even though you can pass a fractional second such as 0.001 for one millisecond into the time.sleep() function, the actual delay may be higher because your Python interpreter, operating system, and hardware don’t really provide this fine granularity.
The following may be an imperfect alternative, although it may run into the same problem. After that, in Method 3, I’ll give you another more precise alternative.
Method 2: Use Threading Timer
You can import threading and create a timer object t using t = threading.Timer(seconds, func). Then use t.start() to execute func() after 0.5 seconds. The Timer() constructor also allows optional args and kwargs arguments if you want to pass values into the function call.
from threading import Timer
def world():
print("... world")
t = Timer(0.5, world)
print('hello...')
t.start() # prints '... world' after 0.5 secondsLike in the first method, the output first prints:
hello...… and then 0.5 seconds (500 milliseconds) later:
... worldMethod 3: Asyncio Sleep
An easy way is to use asyncio.sleep(0.001), for instance, to get your Python program to sleep for 1 millisecond. Import asyncio, define an asynchronous function using async def with the body statement await asyncio.sleep(seconds), and run the asynchronous function using asyncio.run() passing the function object.
Here’s a minimal example you can use as a template:
import asyncio
async def main():
await asyncio.sleep(0.001) # sleep for approx 1 millisecond
print('world')
print('hello')
asyncio.run(main())
The output is simply:
hello world
Except that the second print() statement is only executed after a 1-millisecond sleep.
You can learn more on asynchronous functions in my blog post here:
💡 Recommended: Python Async Function
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