[Python-ideas] api suggestions for the cProfile module

[Gregory P. Smith]

At a glance, all of these sound like good modernizing enhancements for
cprofile. It just takes someone to contribute the work. :)

On Tue, Jan 10, 2017, 8:57 AM Ethan Furman <ethan at stoneleaf.us> wrote:

> On 01/10/2017 08:36 AM, Thane Brimhall wrote:
>
> > Does anyone have thoughts on this topic? I assume the silence is because
> >  this suggestion is too trivial to matter.
>
> Sometimes it's just a matter of timing.  :)
>
> > I use cProfile a lot, and would like to suggest three
> backwards-compatible
> >  improvements to the API.
> >
> > 1: When using cProfile on a specific piece of code I often use the
> >  enable() and disable() methods. It occurred to me that this would
> >  be an obvious place to use a context manager.
>
> Absolutely.
>
> > 2: Enhance the `print_stats` method on Profile to accept more options
> >  currently available only through the pstats.Stats class. For example,
> >  strip_dirs could be a boolean argument, and limit could accept an int.
> >  This would reduce the number of cases you'd need to use the more complex
> >  API.
>
> I don't have much experience with cProfile, but this seems reasonable.
>
> > 3: I often forget which string keys are available for sorting. It would
> >  be nice to add an enum for these so a user could have their linter and
> >  IDE check that value pre-runtime. Since it would subclass `str` and
> >  `Enum` it would still work with all currently existing code.
>
> Absolutely!  :)
>
> > The current documentation contains the following code:
> >
> >     import cProfile, pstats, io
> >     pr = cProfile.Profile()
> >     pr.enable()
> >     # ... do something ...
> >     pr.disable()
> >     s = io.StringIO()
> >     sortby = 'cumulative'
> >     ps = pstats.Stats(pr, stream=s).sort_stats(sortby)
> >     ps.print_stats()
> >     print(s.getvalue())
> >
> > While the code below doesn't exactly match the functionality above (eg.
> not
> >  using StringIO), I envision the context manager working like this, along
> >  with some adjustments on how to get the stats from the profiler:
> >
> >     import cProfile, pstats
> >     with cProfile.Profile() as pr:
> >          # ... do something ...
> >          pr.print_stats(sort=pstats.Sort.cumulative, limit=10,
> strip_dirs=True)
> >
> > As you can see, the code is shorter and somewhat more self-documenting.
> The
> >  best thing about these suggestions is that as far as I can tell they
> would
> >  be backwards-compatible API additions.
>
> The `pr.print_stats... line should not be inside the `with` block unless
> you want to profile that part as well.
>
> These suggestions seem fairly uncontroversial.  Have you opened an issue
> on the issue tracker?
>
> The fun part of the patch will be the C code, but a Python
> proof-of-concept would be useful.
>
> --
> ~Ethan~
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