Overview

Script to help visualize profiling data collected with the cProfile Python module with the kcachegrind (screenshots) graphical calltree analyser.

This is a rebranding of the venerable http://www.gnome.org/~johan/lsprofcalltree.py script by David Allouche et Al. It aims at making it easier to distribute (e.g. through PyPI) and behave more like the scripts of the debian kcachegrind-converters package. The final goal is to make it part of the official upstream kdesdk package.

Command line usage

Upon installation you should have a pyprof2calltree script in your path:

$ pyprof2calltree --help
usage: pyprof2calltree [-h] [-o output_file_path] [-i input_file_path] [-k]
                       [-r scriptfile [args ...]]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -o output_file_path, --outfile output_file_path
                        Save calltree stats to <outfile>
  -i input_file_path, --infile input_file_path
                        Read Python stats from <infile>
  -k, --kcachegrind     Run the kcachegrind tool on the converted data
  -r scriptfile [args ...], --run-script scriptfile [args ...]
                        Name of the Python script to run to collect profiling
                        data

Python shell usage

pyprof2calltree is also best used from an interactive Python shell such as the default shell. For instance let us profile XML parsing:

>>> from xml.etree import ElementTree
>>> from cProfile import Profile
>>> xml_content = '<a>\n' + '\t<b/><c><d>text</d></c>\n' * 100 + '</a>'
>>> profiler = Profile()
>>> profiler.runctx(
...     "ElementTree.fromstring(xml_content)",
...     locals(), globals())

>>> from pyprof2calltree import convert, visualize
>>> visualize(profiler.getstats())                            # run kcachegrind
>>> convert(profiler.getstats(), 'profiling_results.kgrind')  # save for later

or with the ipython:

In [1]: %doctest_mode
Exception reporting mode: Plain
Doctest mode is: ON

>>> from xml.etree import ElementTree
>>> xml_content = '<a>\n' + '\t<b/><c><d>text</d></c>\n' * 100 + '</a>'
>>> %prun -D out.stats ElementTree.fromstring(xml_content)

*** Profile stats marshalled to file 'out.stats'

>>> from pyprof2calltree import convert, visualize
>>> visualize('out.stats')
>>> convert('out.stats', 'out.kgrind')

>>> results = %prun -r ElementTree.fromstring(xml_content)
>>> visualize(results)

Change log

• 1.4.5 - 2020-04-19: Nothing user facing - changes to testing and remove deprecated eggecutable

• 1.4.4 - 2018-10-19: Numerous small improvements, drop support for EOL python versions

• 1.4.3 - 2017-07-28: Windows support (fixed is_installed check - #21)

• 1.4.2 - 2017-07-19: No feature or bug fixes, just license clarification (#20)

• 1.4.1 - 2017-05-20: No feature or bug fixes, just test distribution (#17)

• 1.4.0 - 2016-09-03: Support multiple functions with the same name, tick unit from millis to nanos, tests added (#15)

• 1.3.2 - 2014-07-05: Bugfix: correct source file paths (#12)

• 1.3.1 - 2013-11-27: Bugfix for broken output writing on Python 3 (#8)

• 1.3.0 - 2013-11-19: qcachegrind support

• 1.2.0 - 2013-11-09: Python 3 support

• 1.1.1 - 2013-09-25: Miscellaneous bugfixes

• 1.1.0 - 2008-12-21: integrate fix in conversion by David Glick

• 1.0.3 - 2008-10-16: fix typos in 1.0 release

• 1.0 - 2008-10-16: initial release under the pyprof2calltree name