Measure hmac encoding performance Base64 vs hex digest

timeit_hmac.py

import base64
import hmac
import string
from hashlib import sha256


UTF8 = 'utf-8'
MESSAGE = '1457369891.672671'
SECRET_KEY = 'my secret key'


def create_hmac():
    new_hmac = hmac.new(bytes(SECRET_KEY, UTF8), digestmod=sha256)
    new_hmac.update(bytes(MESSAGE, UTF8))
    return new_hmac


def base64_digest():
    return base64.b64encode(create_hmac().digest())


def hex_digest():
    return create_hmac().hexdigest()


if __name__ == '__main__':
    from timeit import timeit
    
    print(timeit('base64_digest()', number=100000,
                  setup='from __main__ import base64_digest'))
    print(timeit('hex_digest()', number=100000,
                 setup='from __main__ import hex_digest'))

# Got approximately next output:
# 1.235968765002326
# 1.0631242269882932