How to profile a scrapy python script?

Question

Taking the example script

import scrapy
from scrapy.spiders import CrawlSpider, Rule
from scrapy.linkextractors import LinkExtractor

class MySpider(CrawlSpider):
    name = 'example.com'
    allowed_domains = ['example.com']
    start_urls = ['http://www.example.com']

    rules = (
        # Extract links matching 'category.php' (but not matching 'subsection.php')
        # and follow links from them (since no callback means follow=True by default).
        Rule(LinkExtractor(allow=('category\.php', ), deny=('subsection\.php', ))),

        # Extract links matching 'item.php' and parse them with the spider's method parse_item
        Rule(LinkExtractor(allow=('item\.php', )), callback='parse_item'),
    )

    def parse_item(self, response):
        self.logger.info('Hi, this is an item page! %s', response.url)
        item = scrapy.Item()
        item['id'] = response.xpath('//td[@id="item_id"]/text()').re(r'ID: (\d+)')
        item['name'] = response.xpath('//td[@id="item_name"]/text()').extract()
        item['description'] = response.xpath('//td[@id="item_description"]/text()').extract()
        return item

can anyone please let me know practically how to do profiling of this script ?

Thanks

Answer 1

That depends on what you want to profile:

• If it is general debugging, see Debugging Spiders

• If it is memory usage, see Debugging memory leaks

• If it is crawling rate and other statistics, see Stats Collection

• If you want to interact with the spider at runtime, the Telnet Console might be the way to go.

There is also Logging, of course.