Intuitive Python

Profiling Python Code with cProfile

Finding bottlenecks in your code can help you write more performant scripts and procedures. Python’s standard library includes a profiling module named cProfile to help you find where your program is spending its time; you’ll learn about cProfile in this section.

In general, to use cProfile you can do the following:

1. Enable a profiler and run the code you’d like to profile (disabling the profiler when you are done).

2. Investigate the Stats produced by the profiling session.^[67]

Let’s try this out with an example. cprofile_example.py profiles the function named a and writes the Stats to a file named example.stats:

cprofile_example.py

import cProfile

def a():
    b()
    b()

def b():
  ...