Utilities for Profiling¶
This directory contains some simple utilities to assist in the profiling
of Python programs using the hotshot profiler (which is more accurate
than the profile module) and the KCacheGrind visualizer.
Copy the following file somewhere in your $PATH and make it
executable. It contains a detailed docstring with usage information:
- pycachegrind.py (here is a syntax-highlighted HTML version)
If you have any problems with the default setup, copy this as well and modify the source in pycachegrind.py to use it instead:
Recent installations of kcachegrind should already include the
hotshot2calltree tool needed to convert hotshot output into something
that kcachegrind understands, so you should in principle not need the
second file.
This is the kind of call graph visualization that you can expect to obtain (click on the image to enlarge it):
{.align-center width=“375px”
height=“300px”}
Caveats¶
Please note that profiling Python codes accurately is not particularly easy, given the interplay at runtime between the Python interpreter itself and extension code written in C. These two links provide some extra details on the matter.
Licensing¶
- pycachegrind.py: BSD
- hotshot2cachegrind.py: GPL (from its original author)
Acknowledgments¶
This code is heavily inspired in scripts written by Arnd Baecker and Nikolai Hlubek, and posted to the SciPy mailing lists. Hotshot2cachegrind was written by Joerg Beyer, the code linked above is his unmodified original.