RunSnakeRun

RunSnakeRun is a small GUI utility that allows you to view (Python) cProfile or Profile profiler dumps in a sortable GUI view.  It allows you to explore the profiler information using a "square map" visualization or sortable tables of data.  It also (experimentally) allows you to view the output of the Meliae "memory analysis" tool using the same basic visualisations.

Features

RunSnakeRun is a simple program, it doesn't provide all the bells-and-whistles of a program like KCacheGrind, it's intended to allow for profiling your Python programs, and just your Python programs.  What it does provide, for profile viewing:

If you are new to profiling you may wish to check out the author's presentation at PyCon 2009 which tries to explain the use of profiling as a tool.

For meliae memory-dump viewing, it provides:

Installation

You will need to have all of wxPython, SquareMap and RunSnakeRun installed to use RunSnakeRun.  You may also need the "python-profile" package for your platform, which provides the pstats view.

You will likely want to use your platform wxPython package.  If you already have Python setuptools installed (a.k.a. easy_install), you should be able to install the Python packages with:

easy_install RunSnakeRun

You will require a modern wxPython and Python installation.  The setup will create a script named "runsnake" on Linux machines which launches the profile viewer.

Usage

cProfile Viewing

To use cProfile to capture your application's profile data:

import cProfile
command = """reactor.run()"""
cProfile.runctx( command, globals(), locals(), filename="OpenGLContext.profile" )

To view the results of your run:

python runsnake.py OpenGLContext.profile

There will be a brief delay as the application is created and begins the loading process, then you should see something like this:

Screenshot of the application viewing a HotShot profile

Click on any column title to sort by that property within that list.  Select a record in the left-most list view to see a breakdown of that record in the right-side list views.  Choose the appropriate view on the right via the tabs.  You can resize the borders between the lists and square-map views.  You can select a package/module/function hierarchic view via the menus.  You can also toggle use of percentage displays there.

Meliae Memory Analysis

Note: this feature is considered experimental, the memory consumed loading even a tiny meliae dump is enormous, so real-world programs will make RunSnakeRun quite slow and require a very large amount of RAM (far more than the process being viewed).

To install Meliae, you will need a working C extension compilation environment (Meliae uses a Cython extension):

easy_install meliae

Now instrument your application to be able to trigger a memory dump at the moment you would like to capture, like so:

from meliae import scanner
scanner.dump_all_objects( filename ) # you can pass a file-handle if you prefer

The memory dump will generally be quite large (e.g. 2MB to describe an application with 200KB of user-controllable memory usage (i.e. not the interpreter itself)) and for any real application will take an extremely long time to load (multiple minutes for 16MB dumps).


Screenshot of a meliae memory view

The Meliae loader in RunSnakeRun performs the following simplifications:

Even with those simplifications, however, the program is tracking most ints, strings, tuples, lists, etc. separately, which uses a large amount of RAM and slows down the GUI substantially.

Code Access and Contributions

RunSnakeRun is reasonably stable.  I don't tend to do much work on it, as it tends to just work.  My (personal) current wish list for the project follows:

If you have an idea, feel free to check out the code and implement the new feature.  I'm certainly willing to entertain new features or bug-fix requests as well.  The code is available in bzr here:

bzr branch lp:~mcfletch/squaremap/trunk squaremap
cd squaremap
python setup.py develop
bzr branch lp:~mcfletch/runsnakerun/trunk runsnakerun
cd runsnakerun
python setup.py develop

You can contact me directly if you'd like to contribute.  Or you can just set up a bzr branch on LaunchPad and request a merge.

Roadmap/Wish-list

This is just a listing of things that either I or others have requested as features:

Other Tools

RunSnakeRun is by no means a comprehensive tool-set for profiling, you may want to have any or all of these other tools available for your profiling needs:

Releases/Downloads

Copyright 2005-2011 Contributors