1/7/2024 0 Comments Nifty stopwatchThat makes cProfile unsuitable for profiling apps in production with live data, but perfectly fine for profiling them during development.įor a more detailed rundown of cProfile, see our separate article. The other drawback is cProfile’s execution model: It traps every single function call, creating a significant amount of overhead. Trying to find the right needle in all that hay can be overwhelming. Which brings us to the first of cProfile’s drawbacks: It generates a lot of statistics by default. This approach works best only after you’ve narrowed things down a bit, but saves you the trouble of having to wade through the noise of a full profile trace. You can sample a whole program’s run, or you can toggle profiling on only when a select function runs, the better to focus on what that function is doing and what it is calling. Three, and perhaps best of all, you can constrain cProfile freely. This lets you determine whether a function is slow itself or it’s calling other functions that are slow. Two, it profiles a number of different statistics about call behavior-for instance, it separates out the time spent in a function call’s own instructions from the time spent by all the other calls invoked by the function. One, it’s included with the standard library, so it’s available even in a stock Python installation. ![]() When run, cProfile traces every function call in your program and generates a list of which functions were called most often and how long the calls took on average.ĬProfile has three big strengths. The Python standard library also comes with a whole-program analysis profiler, cProfile. Neither one suffices for whole-program analysis-finding out where in the thousands of lines of code your program spends most of its time. These modules only work if you’re dealing with code in isolation. The downside of Time is that it’s nothing more than a stopwatch, and the downside of Timeit is that its main use case is microbenchmarks on individual lines or blocks of code. It’s best used to determine how a single operation or function call performs in a tight loop-for instance, if you want to determine if a list comprehension or a conventional list construction will be faster for something done many times over. The timeit.timeit function takes a code snippet, runs it many times (the default is 1 million passes), and obtains the total time required to do so. The Timeit module attempts to perform something like actual benchmarking on Python code. This gives you an unobtrusive, low-overhead-if also unsophisticated-way to time code. Call time.perf_counter once before an action, once after, and obtain the difference between the two. The Time module has the perf_counter function, which calls on the operating system’s high-resolution timer to obtain an arbitrary timestamp. ![]() The Python standard library comes with two functions that work as stopwatches. If all you’re doing is profiling the time between two snippets of code that take seconds or minutes on end to run, then a stopwatch will more than suffice. ![]() Here I cover nine of the most significant, most of which run cross-platform and are readily available either in PyPI or in Python’s standard library. These tools range from simple one-liners included with the standard library to sophisticated frameworks for gathering stats from running applications. The good news is, Python offers a whole slew of packages you can use to profile your applications and learn where it’s slowest. Statistics about actual program performance are always your best first tool in the pursuit of making applications faster. ![]() In those cases, you need to find out where and why it lags, and do something about it.Ī well-respected adage of software development, and engineering generally, is “Measure, don’t guess.” With software, it’s easy to assume what’s wrong, but never a good idea to do so. Although Python code is almost always fast enough for the task, sometimes it isn’t. Python has always favored writing fast versus running fast. Every programming language has two kinds of speed: speed of development, and speed of execution.
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