Using cProfile results with KCacheGrind

With cProfile you can also profile existing programs, without making any separate profiling script. Just run program with profiler

python -m cProfile -o profile_data.pyprof script_to_profile.py

and open profile data in kcachegrind with pyprof2calltree, whose -k switch automatically opens data in kcachegrind

pyprof2calltree -i profile_data.pyprof -k

For example profiling whole paster server and webapp would be done like this

python -m cProfile -o pyprof.out `which paster` serve development.ini

pyprof2calltree can be installed with easy_install.

You could use profilestats.profile decorator ($ pip install profilestats) -- a simple wrapper for pyprof2calltree module (rebranding of lsprofcalltree.py):

from profilestats import profile@profiledef func():    # do something here

Script can be run as usual. profilestats creates two files: cachegrind.out.profilestats and profilestats.prof in KCachegrind-compatible and cProfile formats correspondingly.

It can be done using an external module called lscallproftree

This article explains how: CherryPy - CacheGrind

With my resulting code looking like so:

...if profile:    import cProfile    import lsprofcalltree    profileFileName = 'Profiles/pythonray_' + time.strftime('%Y%m%d_%H%M%S') + '.profile'    profile = cProfile.Profile()    profile.run('pilImage = camera.render(scene, samplePattern)')    kProfile = lsprofcalltree.KCacheGrind(profile)    kFile = open (profileFileName, 'w+')    kProfile.output(kFile)    kFile.close()    profile.print_stats()    else:                pilImage = camera.render(scene, samplePattern)...

If anyone knows a way to do this that doesn't require an external (ie. not shipped with Python) module, I'd still be very interested to hear about it.