Python timeit not working?

Question

Can somebody explain me why this is happening?

aatiis@aiur ~ $ time python /usr/lib64/python2.7/timeit.py -n 1 \
    -- 'x = 10**1000'
1 loops, best of 3: 0.954 usec per loop

real    0m0.055s
user    0m0.050s
sys     0m0.000s

aatiis@aiur ~ $ time python /usr/lib64/python2.7/timeit.py -n 1 \
    -- 'x = 10**100000'
1 loops, best of 3: 0.954 usec per loop

real    0m0.067s
user    0m0.040s
sys     0m0.020s

aatiis@aiur ~ $ time python /usr/lib64/python2.7/timeit.py -n 1 \
    -- 'x = 10**10000000'
1 loops, best of 3: 0.954 usec per loop

real    0m20.802s
user    0m20.540s
sys     0m0.170s

I get the exact same result from timeit, but time tells me that evaluating 10**10000000 takes more than 20 seconds. The same happens if I call timeit from the interpreter:

>>> t = time.time()
>>> print timeit.timeit('x = 10**10000000;', number=1)
5.00679016113e-06
>>> print time.time() - t
20.6168580055

Why is my timeit not working, or what am I doing wrong?

Additional info:

>>> print sys.version
2.7.1+ (2.7:4f07cacb2c3b+, Mar 28 2011, 23:11:59)
[GCC 4.4.5]

>>> print sys.version_info
>>> sys.version_info(major=2, minor=7, micro=2, releaselevel='alpha', serial=0)

UPDATE:

Here's another very interesting observation:

>>> def run():
...     t = time.time()
...     x = 10**10000000
...     print time.time() - t

When I press enter after defining this function, it takes about half a minute till I get back to a prompt. And then:

>>> run()
2.14576721191e-06

Why is that happening? Is the function body being pre-compiled or optimized somehow?

Answer 1

Compare:

>>> import dis
>>> def run():
...     return 10**100
... 
>>> dis.dis(run)
  3           0 LOAD_CONST               3 (100000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000L)
              3 RETURN_VALUE        

And

>>> def runvar():
...     x = 10
...     return x**100
... 
>>> dis.dis(runvar)
  3           0 LOAD_CONST               1 (10)
              3 STORE_FAST               0 (x)

  4           6 LOAD_FAST                0 (x)
              9 LOAD_CONST               2 (100)
             12 BINARY_POWER        
             13 RETURN_VALUE        

Notice that BINARY_POWER is executed at runtime only in the second case. So timeit behaves as it should.