Progressbar should update on a regular interval about python-progressbar HOT 7 CLOSED

I had actually thought about this issue. The only problem is incurring a call 
for time.time() in every step. I'll see if that can be avoided (maybe using an 
alarm, or a secondary thread), but it might even not be worth it.

+1, maybe ETA can be used to determine number of updates required for smooth 
operation?

I'm not convinced that calling `time.time()` is a large problem

From IPython
In [1]: import time
In [2]: %timeit time.time()
1000000 loops, best of 3: 269 ns per loop

Interesting. It's a bit slower in the machine I'm using right now:

In [22]: %timeit pbar._need_update()
timeit1000000 loops, best of 3: 617 ns per loop

In [23]: %timeit time.time()
1000000 loops, best of 3: 1.37 µs per loop

Adding a call to time.time() in _need_update() increases the time of a single 
call to:

In [54]: %timeit pbar._need_update()
100000 loops, best of 3: 2.31 µs per loop

Still doesn't look like a large enough amount to worry about. If you're 
actually running updates on the progress bar more than 432,900 times per second 
than you've got a different problem ;)

Done in 
https://code.google.com/p/python-progressbar/source/detail?r=a00c6b7ca3c5a1cd7c3
8386e91bffde086607e3d

Please check if it's OK, if you can. Thanks.

It's working perfectly. Great patch!