Introduction to Code Profiling

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. Python comes with three profilers built in: cProfile, profile and hotshot. According to the Python documentation, hotshot is “no longer maintained and may be dropped in a future version of Python”. The profile module is a pure Python module, but adds a lot of overhead to profiled programs. Thus we will be focusing on cProfile, which has an interface that mimics the profile module.