Profiling in Python: Who called the function?

Question

I almost always view the output of the cProfile module using Gprof2dot, basically it converts the output into a graphvis graph (a .dot file), for example:

It makes it very easy to determine which function is slowest, and which function[s] called it.

Usage is:

python -m cProfile -o output.pstats path/to/your/script arg1 arg2
gprof2dot.py -f pstats output.pstats | dot -Tpng -o output.png

That may not answer your question directly, but will definitely help. If use the profiler with option --sort cumulative it will sort the functions by cumulative time. Which is helpful to detect not only heavy functions but the functions that call them.

python -m cProfile --sort cumulative myScript.py

There is a workaround to get the caller function:

import inspect
print inspect.getframeinfo(inspect.currentframe().f_back)[2]

You can add as many f_back as you want in case you want the caller caller etc If you want to calculate frequent calls you can do this:

record = {}

caller = inspect.getframeinfo(inspect.currentframe().f_back)[2]
record[caller] = record.get(caller, 0) + 1

Then print them by order of frequency:

print sorted(record.items(), key=lambda a: a[1])

inspect.stack() will give you the current caller stack.

You might want to take a look at pycallgraph.

It is possible to do it using profiler cProfile in standard library.
In pstats.Stats (the profiler result) there is method print_callees (or alternatively print_callers).

Example code:

import cProfile, pstats
pr = cProfile.Profile()
pr.enable()

# ... do something ...

pr.disable()
ps = pstats.Stats(pr).strip_dirs().sort_stats('cumulative')
ps.print_callees()

Result will be something like:

Function                           called...
                                       ncalls  tottime  cumtime
ElementTree.py:1517(_start_list)   ->   24093    0.048    0.124  ElementTree.py:1399(start)
                                        46429    0.015    0.041  ElementTree.py:1490(_fixtext)
                                        70522    0.015    0.015  ElementTree.py:1497(_fixname)
ElementTree.py:1527(_data)         ->   47827    0.017    0.026  ElementTree.py:1388(data)
                                        47827    0.018    0.053  ElementTree.py:1490(_fixtext)

On the left you have the caller, on the right you have the callee.
(for example _fixtext was called from _data 47827 times and from _start_list 46429 times)

See also:

• docs.python.org/..#print_callees - show call hierarchy. Group by the caller. (used above)
• docs.python.org/..#print_callers - show call hierarchy. Group by the callee.

Couple of notes:

• Your code needs to be edited for this (insert those profile statements).
  (i.e. not possible to use from command line like python -m cProfile myscript.py. Though it is possible to write separate script for that)
• A bit unrelated, but strip_dirs() must go before sort_stats() (otherwise sorting does not work)

I have not used cProfile myself, but most profilers give you a call hierarchy.
Googling I found this slides about cProfile. Maybe that helps. Page 6 looks like cProfile does provide a hierarchy.