How to Profile a script in Python

Question

Project Euler and other coding contests often have a maximum time to run or people boast of how fast their particular solution runs. With python, sometimes the approaches add timing code to __main__.

What is the best way to profile how long a python program takes to run?

Comments

Hello, Code profiling is an attempt to find bottlenecks in your code. Profiling is supposed to find what parts of your code take the longest. Once you know that, then you can look at those pieces of your code and try to find ways to optimize it. Check here for detail explanation.

Thanks.

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Hello @sandeep, the definition is good. Can you say something about the ways of doing it?

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@sandeep thank you it was of good help

Answer 1

Python includes a profiler called cProfile. It not only gives the total running time, but also times each function separately, and tells you how many times each function was called, making it easy to determine where you should make optimizations.

You can call it from within your code, or from the interpreter, like this:

import cProfile
cProfile.run('foo()')