Learning Python Application Development

Summary

This chapter was the first one in the series of three chapters based on performance. It laid the ground work to improve application performance. We learned how to record the runtime using the time module. We also saw how the timeit module can be used to measure the performance of small pieces of code. We took a practical problem where an application ran fine when working with a small input, but, as the input grew larger, it slowed down considerably. With this example, we learned how to identify the bottlenecks using cProfile and display the results using pstats.

We saw how the line_profiler module can help locate the time consuming statements inside a function. While most of the discussion was focused on the runtime performance, we briefly ...