mProfile

Matlab style line-based profiling for python

Similar in principle to rkern's line_profiler (https://github.com/pyutils/line_profiler), this offers line-by-line profiling of python code. It has a reasonably high profiling overhead, making it most suited for profiling code such as numpy array operations which spend a large fraction of their time in compiled c code. When used for strait python functions, you will inevitably see some distortions due to the profiling overhead

Note:

This package was meant to replace the version available within the PYME.utils module of python-microscopy (https://github.com/python-microscopy/python-microscopy/blob/master/PYME/util/mProfile/), but stalled due to a pypi naming conflict. Since then, important Python3 compatibility changes have been made to the version in python-microscopy. We still plan on extracting the functionality and publishing this as a separate package (under a different name), but in the interim USE THE python-microscopy VERSION INSTEAD.

Installation

git clone https://github.com/python-microscopy/mProfile
cd mProfile
python setup.py install

pip & conda packages coming soon.

Usage

import mProfile

# turn profiling on and specify which files should be profiled. 
# matching occurs purely on the filename with directories ignored (essentially `os.path.split(fn)[-1] in filenames`)
mProfile.profileOn(['file1.py', 'file2.py'])

# expensive computations
# ....

mProfile.profileOff()
mProfile.report()

When called as above, mProfile.report() will open a new webbrowser window pointing at the profile output. It is possible to redirect the profile output to file instead.

mProfile.report(display=False, profiledir='/path/to/a/directory')

which will save one .html profile file for each of the files specified in the profileOn() call

An example snippet of profile output is given below:

Key differences to line_profiler

• requires less modification of the code (no decorators etc)
• code to be profiled is selected on a per-file basis not per-function
• output is provided as pretty, syntax-highlighted HTML with expensive lines coloured
• performance is likely inferior / profiling overhead higher as it is implemented entirely in python (no cython optimisations etc...)