While looking for a straightforward way to visualize python cProfile profiling data I stumbled over the nice tool Gprof2Dot which uses GraphVis to generate nice graphics. I am just writing this down so I don’t forget it, so I’ll skip most detail. An even better alternative to this would be Runsnakerun, which provides an interactive GUI for data exploration. However I could’t use this due to some fuckup in my macports gwPython.

1. First, generate some profiling data by
   [code]
   import cProfile
   cProfile.run(‘yourfile.py’,’log.cprofile’)
   [/code]
   and don’t forget the compiler directive @cython.profile(True) if you’re running cython extensions.
2. Secondly, run gprof2dot.py on the generated file, i.e.
   [code]
   python gprof2dot.py -f pstats log | dot -Tpng -o output.png
   [/code]

That’s it. You can probably do more fancy stuff, check the gprof2dot documentation.