Making cProf give only the 10 most time-consuming tasks or sort them by time in reverse order

Question

I'm running the following code line on my terminal to get a profile of my program.

python3 -m cProfile -s time  main.py

However the output it prints is gigantic. I only want to know the 10 most time-consuming tasks or to sort them in ascending order. How can I tell this to cprof?

Answer 1

I found the solution at this other answer. The solution is to use cProfile internally, within the script to be profiled, rather than externally at the command line.

My script looks like this:

def run_code_to_be_profiled():
    pass

if __name__ == "__main__":
    import cProfile

    pr = cProfile.Profile()
    pr.enable()

    run_code_to_be_profiled()

    pr.disable()
    pr.print_stats(sort='time')

I run the script and get useful output.