IPython Interactive Computing and Visualization Cookbook

Profiling your code line-by-line with line_profiler

Python's native cProfile module and the corresponding %prun magic break down the execution time of code function by function. Sometimes, we may need an even more fine-grained analysis of code performance with a line-by-line report. Such reports can be easier to read than the reports of cProfile.

To profile code line-by-line, we need an external Python module named line_profiler created by Robert Kern, available at http://pythonhosted.org/line_profiler/. In this recipe, we will demonstrate how to use this module within IPython.

Getting ready

To install line_profiler, type pip install line_profiler in a terminal, or type !pip install line_profiler in IPython (you need a C compiler).

On Windows, you ...