> That's why I just propose to switch it to time.time(), which surely is available on each and every Python version and implementation.

It's not the same clock. time.clock() measures the process time, which is different from the wall clock time.

Compare time.get_clock_info('clock') to time.get_clock_info('time') and time.get_clock_info('perf_counter').

See also the PEP 418 which lists all these clocks and explain why time.clock() was deprecated:
http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0418/