Advanced Python Programming - Second Edition

Chapter 1: Benchmarking and Profiling

Recognizing the slow parts of your program is the single most important task when it comes to speeding up your code. In most cases, the code that causes the application to slow down is a very small fraction of the program. By identifying these critical sections, you can focus on the parts that need the most improvement without wasting time in micro-optimization.

Profiling is a technique that allows us to pinpoint the most resource-intensive parts of an application. A profiler is a program that runs an application and monitors how long each function takes to execute, thus detecting the functions on which your application spends most of its time.

Python provides several tools to help us find these bottlenecks ...