Filtering out irrelevant cProfile output

Question

I'm profiling a Python application with cProfile, and I find its output to be quite verbose. I am using this code to create the profile and visualize it:

PYTHONPATH=. \
    python3 \
    -m cProfile \
        -s cumtime \
        -o output.cprof \
    foo/__main__.py && \
gprof2dot \
    -f pstats \
    output.cprof | \
dot -Tpdf -o output.pdf

For example, here's part of a graph that I've created with gprof2dot:

Obviously, these are methods I am not interested in. I know, however, the name of the function I want to inspect, let's call it foo:xxx:my_function. How can I get the cProfile output filtered so that I can only look at this function and its callees?

I've seen this question, but it only talks about looking at the head of the output.

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 28 '19 at 14:15

Fortunately, gprof2dot has an option to filter function names.

So, I can just use -z with the name of the function on the node to see the descendants only:

python3 \
    -m cProfile \
        -s cumtime \
        -o output.cprof \
    foo/__main__.py && \
gprof2dot \
    -f pstats \
    -z "foo:xxx:my_function" \
    output.cprof | \
dot -Tpdf -o output.pdf

Filtering out irrelevant cProfile output

1 Answers1