RunSnakeRun is a nice tool to view the pstats data the python profiler generates. But for me, the squaremap is hard to read and does not really add any value. A

RunSnakeRun is a nice tool to view the pstats data the python profiler generates. But for me, the squaremap is hard to read and does not really add any value. Also there is no way to 'watch' a pstats file, or combine many files into one. Generally I prefer working with the commandline, even for starting gui applications. My current setup to profile a python cgi application consists of a set of scripts to mock the cgi runtime, invoke the application with cprofile and accumulate profiling data in a single pstats file. To get a grasp of the hot spots, I'm using the magnificent gprof2dot script (http://code.google.com/p/jrfonseca/wiki/Gprof2Dot http://code.google.com/p/jrfonseca/wiki/Gprof2Dot) to generate a callgraph with profiling data (example: http://wiki.jrfonseca.googlecode.com/git/gprof2dot.png http://wiki.jrfonseca.googlecode.com/git/gprof2dot.png). Gprof2dot hides all unimportant (by default less than 1% runtime) calls and colors functions according to the time spend executing them. To view absolute numbers, I wrote a small python script to print the first view entries of a pstats file to the terminal and use that with watch (http://linux.die.net/man/1/watch http://linux.die.net/man/1/watch) to keep an eye on absolute runtimes. Overall this is a nice setup and I'm very impressed by the rich amount tools available for python, though sometimes the APIs are kind of strange to me (for example cProfile, pstats).