Profiling (notes)

last update: 2021-08-14

Before profiling your code, it is always a good idea to (re-)evaluate the implemented algorithms. Maybe there are asymptotically faster algorithms available that solve your performance problems. If not, you need to profile your code.

Python

In Python, you essentially have two options - using Python's cProfile profiler or simply resorting to the timeit module. In the first case, the usage is

from cProfile import Profile

# ...
profiler.enable()
# your profiled code
# ...
profiler.disable()
profiler.print_stats(sort=1)

If you want to profile an entire executable module, you could do so from the command-line instead

python3 -m cProfile -o profile.out your_module.py
python3 -m pstats
% read profile.out
profile.out% callers your_function
profile.out% callees your_function
% quit

Timeit is better suited for smaller tests (to measure execution times of small code snippets). This can be done via

import timeit
# timeit.timeit(stmt='pass', setup='pass',
#               timer=, number=1000000)
# eg.
print(timeit.timeit("[x**2 for x in range(100)]", number=10000))

Alternatively, you can use timeit from your operating system's command-line (-s is the setup required before timing your function.)

python3 -m timeit -n 10000 -s "from your_module import your_function as f" "f()"

C++

For profiling C++ code, there are many options. An easy to start with way is the valgrind suite with its callgrind tool in combination with the kcachegrind graphical user interface. First, make sure everything is installed

sudo apt-get install valgrind kcachegrind

Make sure you've compiled your program with debugging information (compiler flag -g). Then generate profiling data via

valgrind --tool=callgrind ${YOUR_PROGRAM} ${YOUR_OPTIONS}

This will generate a file named callgrind.out.* which can then be analyzed using kcachegrind

kcachegrind callgrind.out.*