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pythoncprofile

Correct Way To Use cProfile

I want to profile some functions that I've written. I'm looking at the docs for cProfile, and I don't understand what (if any) the difference between the following two pieces of code is:

import cProfile

profile = cProfile.Profile()
result = profile.runcall(func, *args, **kwargs)
profile.dump_stats('profile.stats')

and

import cProfile

profile = cProfile.Profile()
profile.enable()
result = func(*args, **kwargs)
profile.disable()
profile.dump_stats('profile.stats')

Are these two blocks equivalent, or are these doing subtly different things?

Solution

  • They're almost the same: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/581eb3e0dc0bc0d306363c8d404ffd9988b0cc87/Lib/cProfile.py#L106

    runcall will stop the profiling in case of exceptions, but otherwise it's the same functionality.