This is a collection of minimalist utilities for profiling Python programs. The motivation behind them is described in our blog post.

py2devtools

The profile visualizer that's built into the Chrome developer tools is pretty rad. py2devtools.py contains instrumentation to create a .cpuprofile file from a Python program that can be loaded into the developer tools. See the module docstring for details.

stacksampler

stacksampler.py contains a sampling profiler, along with a minimal embedded HTTP server to expose its data. It's built to work with gevented applications, but can be adapted to work without. Assuming gevent, drop

import stacksampler
gevent.spawn(stacksampler.run_profiler)

into your code, run your application, and then do

curl localhost:16384

to get profiling data. See the module docstring for more details.

The stackcollector agent

The stackcollector package adds basic support for automatically collecting and visualizing profiles from distributed processes. It has two parts: a long-running collector agent that periodically gets samples from processes, and a frontend that serves visualizations. Data is timestamped and persisted using gdbm, allowing for time-based querying.

Installation

# create a directory for data files
sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/stackcollector
sudo chmod a+rw /var/lib/stackcollector

virtualenv .
source bin/activate
python setup.py install

Running the collector

The collector assumes that processes expose profiles in the flamegraph line format over HTTP, as implemented by stacksampler.py.

# Every minute, gather stacks from a local process listening on port 16384.
python -m stackcollector.collector --host localhost -port 16384 --interval 60

Running the visualizer

python -m stackcollector.visualizer --port 5555

Then visit e.g. http://localhost:5555?from=-15minutes to see data from the past 15 minutes.

Questions? Issues?

Don't hesitate to get in touch!