Profiling

In contrast to performance tracing, profiling does not provide information about the timing of events, but instead provides combined information about the total time of execution of each function. It also produces a call graph that simplifies understanding the call relationship between functions.

Example part of execution graph

The basic tool for profile in Python is the built-in module cProfile. To profile an entire script, use the call:

python -m cProfile path_to_script.py

The output will be a table similar to this one:

         2334264 function calls (2267576 primitive calls) in 2.242 seconds

   Ordered by: internal time

   ncalls  tottime  percall  cumtime  percall filename:lineno(function)
    21241    0.252    0.000    0.252    0.000 {method 'reduce' of 'numpy.ufunc' objects}
80547/57578    0.080    0.000    0.765    0.000 {built-in method numpy.core._multiarray_umath.implement_array_function}
     1048    0.060    0.000    0.060    0.000 {built-in method marshal.loads}
    62683    0.052    0.000    0.052    0.000 {built-in method numpy.array}
  122/117    0.042    0.000    0.047    0.000 {built-in method _imp.create_dynamic}
     5152    0.042    0.000    0.053    0.000 stride_tricks.py:114(_broadcast_to)
     5102    0.037    0.000    0.048    0.000 decomp_qr.py:11(safecall)
     2551    0.031    0.000    0.386    0.000 transform_utils.py:153(decompose_linear_matrix)
     2651    0.029    0.000    0.067    0.000 transforms.py:342(__call__)
2172/2108    0.029    0.000    0.087    0.000 {built-in method builtins.__build_class__}
    18283    0.027    0.000    0.278    0.000 fromnumeric.py:70(_wrapreduction)
...

The format of this table is documented in the Python docs here. Because the output for complex programs such as napari can be very long, we suggest piping output to less, or saving it to a file, which can be investigated later. To save the output to file use the -o option:

python -m cProfile -o result.pstat path_to_script.py

Once the file is saved, you can investigate using free tools. Some options include:

  1. The Stat object.

    You can parse the profile output using the Stats object from the pstats built-in library. For example:

    from pstats import Stats
stat = Stats("path/to/result.pstat")
stat.sort_stats("tottime").print_stats(10)

    You can find more documentation about the Stats object in the Python documentation here.

  2. Snakeviz.

    Snakeviz is a third party library designed to visualize profiling output interactively. You can install it with pip like any other Python library using pip install snakeviz. This will provide the snakeviz command, which you can call to create an in-browser visualization of your profiling data. Use the command:

    snakeviz path/to/result.pstat

    This should cause a new page to open in your browser with your profiling information. You can read more about how to interpret this visualization on the snakeviz homepage.

  3. gprof2dot

    You can visualize the call graph with graphviz, a third party graph visualization library. You can install graphviz with system package managers:

    • Ubuntu: sudo apt install graphviz

    • MacOS with brew: brew install graphviz

    • Windows with choco choco install graphviz

    You can then use gprof2dot, a Python library, to convert the .pstat statistics to a .dot graph file and use graphviz:

    $ python -m gprof2dot -f pstats  -n 5  result.pstat -o result.dot
$ dot -Tpng -o result.png result.dot

    If your shell supports piping, this can all be combined into one command:

    $ python -m gprof2dot -f pstats  -n 5  result.pstat -o | dot -Tpng -o result.png

  4. Some IDEs have built in profiling visualization tools. For example, PyCharm Professional, which is free for academics and open source maintainers, allows viewing .pstat files using Tools > Open CProfile snapshot.

cProfile also allows profiling only specific parts of the code. You can restrict profiling to particular code sections using cProfile.Profile() as a context manager:

import cProfile

with cProfile.Profile() as pr:
    code_for_profile()
pr.dump_stats("result.pstat")

The resulting profile can then be visualized using the above methods.

In some situations, you might want to profile code that needs some preliminary steps to be performed in the viewer, which you don’t want to measure. In this situation, you can create a button to trigger profiling:

def testing_fun():
    with cProfile.Profile() as pr:
        code_for_profile()
    pr.dump_stats("camera_layers.pstat")

testing_btn = QPushButton("Profile")
testing_btn.clicked.connect(testing_fun)
viewer.window.add_dock_widget(testing_btn)

In addition to cProfile, third-party profilers are available in Python:

  • yappi with support for multithreading

  • vmprof

Both can be installed with pip.