Structure

An experiment in graphing the control flow of a Python program. Currently does not support multithreaded applications. Graphing done with Graph-Tool.

Usage

First, include the following at the start of your code that you would like to profile.

import structure

s = structure.Structure()
s.setMaxDepth(depth = 3)       # Option: Don't log call stack depth > n
s.setLocal(True)               # Option: Only log files in your script's directory
s.setLogFile("test.log")       # Set the location of the log file
s.beginTrace()

Run your code. The log file "test.log" will be produced. When your code terminates, we're ready to graph the data.

import stackgraph

G = stackgraph.StackGraph()
G.load("test.log")              # All the heavy lifting happens here
G.display()

Graph structure

Results will be stored in a directed graph, where each node represents a function, and an arrow on an edge shows the direction of function calls.

An edge will contain a list of length-2 lists, each of which representing one function call that occurred. To each of these we record:

• Timestamp of each call
• Depth of each call

A node will correspond to a function. It contains:

• Filename where the function is defined
• Name of the containing class if it is a class method
• The function name

In the future, it may contain:

• Elapsed runtime
• A breakdown including time spent waiting for child functions to return

Goal features

• An interactive web-based graph explorer
• On the fly changing of depth that we display
• Playback of program's run by using timestamp data