This morning I sat in on a session by Derek Jones and Richie Saunders who have developed tools for visualizing and profiling applications written in Python. Their company does a lot of work in digital signal processing. Python is great for productivity, but isn’t always fast enough for everyones needs.
There are two libraries available for profiling Python: profile, written in javaPython and hostpot, written in C. They did some cool stuff by using the profiling hooks available to them. For example, they have created a python top that mimics the unix version by showing what is being executed and how much time is being spent in the various parts of your program.
They are working on making the source code for their visualizations available, but have not been able to do so yet. There is no source availble (yet) but hopefully we’ll be able to see some of these tools down the road.
Update: Drew pointed out the obvious mistake above that profile is written in Python. What can I say, I needed more sleep when I wrote this post.
Comments
4 responses to “Profiling and Visualizing Python Program Behavior”
The profile module is written in Python 🙂
Hah yeah you’re right. I don’t know where that came from since I had Python in my notes. I obviously needed more sleep. I’m going to fix that 🙂
Here there’s nothing to be done.
This post appears to get a great deal of visitors. How do you advertise it? It gives a nice unique spin on things. I guess having something real or substantial to talk about is the most important thing.