Python Sleep Introduction

Have you ever needed to wait for something in your Python program? While you generally want your code to run as quickly as possible, there are times when using sleep() function in Python to delay execution is beneficial.

To mimic a delay in your software, for example, you may use the Python sleep() function. It’s possible that you’ll have to wait for a file to upload or download, or for a graphic to load or be rendered on the screen. You might even need to take a break between calls to a web API or database queries. In each of these scenarios, and many others, adding Python sleep() calls to your application will assist!

The sleep() method suspends (waits) the current thread’s execution for a specified number of seconds.

Python offers a time module that contains various helpful methods for dealing with time-related activities. One of the popular functions among them is sleep().

The sleep() method suspends the current thread’s execution for a specified amount of seconds.

Python Sleep/Wait 1 Second

import time
 
# Wait for 5 seconds
time.sleep(5)

# Wait for 300 milliseconds
# .3 can also be used
time.sleep(.300)

How To Wait In Python Script

import time
#Waits 1 second
time.sleep(1)

Python Time Delay

import time
while True:
    print("This prints once a minute.")
    time.sleep(60) # Delay for 1 minute (60 seconds).

Sleep Function Python

import time

print("Printed immediately.")
time.sleep(2.4)
print("Printed after 2.4 seconds.")

Delay Time Python

import time

time.sleep(5) # sleeps for 5 seconds

How to Add Time Delays to Your Python Code

import time

print("Print now")
time.sleep(4.2)
print("Printing after 4.2 seconds")

Python Sleep In Multithreaded Programs

The sleep() method suspends the current thread’s execution for a specified amount of seconds.

Sleep() suspends the thread and process execution in single-threaded programs. In multithreaded systems, however, the function suspends a thread rather than the entire process.

import threading 
import time
  
def print_hello():
  for i in range(4):
    time.sleep(0.5)
    print("Hello")
  
def print_hi(): 
    for i in range(4): 
      time.sleep(0.7)
      print("Hi") 

t1 = threading.Thread(target=print_hello)  
t2 = threading.Thread(target=print_hi)  
t1.start()
t2.start()

There are two threads in the above application. We’ve made use of time. To suspend execution of these two threads for 0.5 seconds and 0.7 seconds, respectively, using time.sleep(0.5) and time.sleep(0.75).

Conclusion

In this article, we learned the fundamentals of Python‘s sleep function and how to use it to implement delay/sleep feature into our scripts. As always, If you have found this article useful do not forget to share it and leave a comment if you have any questions.

Happy Coding…!!!