I'm writing a bunch of algorithms in Python for solving a certain class of problems, and I was interested in doing some comparisons between them and would like to collect various high-level runtime stats, such as the number of invocations of certain key subroutines. I have my own code to do this. Then just earlier today it hit me that I'm really just profiling, albeit in a more restricted way than the "profile" module. This got me thinking and looking deeper at "profile.py", and I've got some questions:
1) I'd still like to run my whole app (i.e., using main()), but I'd like to limit the profiling to only the select few subroutines. That is, say I have a set of such fns in mind, call it "key_fns", and I would like to only profile # of invocations of these fns from key_fns, as well as by whom they were called, and how much cumulative time was spent in them. Is such lower-level control possible? The main reason I want this is that I do not want to profile most of the low-level routines, like vector addition, at least not yet... I don't want to slow down code execution any more than is necessary, as the statistics gathering should occur during "normal" runs (i.e., during normal operation). 2) I've only just discovered that pstats has "print_callers()"! That's very useful info I wasn't aware was available! What I'm really looking for now is profiler output in the style generated by "gprof", the GNU profiler, as I have found that format terribly useful (a section for each fn, with the fn's callers and callees interwoven in each section). Does anyone know of a utility which would format the Python profiling info in that format, or something very similar? I haven't actually seen any output from print_callers (can't find any samples on Net, and my app is currently half-busted, mid-refactor), so if that's what it precisely does, ignore this question. 3) assuming the above-mentioned fine control of (1) is not yet possible, I will muddle on with my own "selective" profiling code; the question I have then is, what is the cleanest way to override a class instance's method at runtime? What my profiler is doing is overriding the key fns/methods of an instance with a stat-gatherer-instrumented version, which ends up calling the original method. I tried reading profile.py and pstats.py for ideas, but they are a little too complicated for me, for now; I doubt that's how they do their profiling anyways. Any way to do this in an automated fashion, given that I have the list of method names I want to instrument in a list variable? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list