Profiling Overview¶

Profiling can mean a few different things, so here are the current ways! Many of these work only on certain platforms and this document will note the limitations. Tools that are noted as being supported in linux are likely to work in osx as well. Most of these approaches are specific to a single language.

Profiling in Python ¶

Profiling with cProfile ¶

Mantid supports profiling of its underlying code using the cProfile module from python.

Launch Mantid Workbench from the command line using the script in the installation folder, adding the --profile modifier with a path to the output file.

E.g: path/to/install/bin/workbench --profile path/to/outputFile.prof

This profile can then either be sent to the developers upon request or be analysed using the python module snakeviz.

Profiling with Yappi ¶

cProfile can only profile the current thread, this makes it useful for diagnosing PyQt performance issues (such as random hangs when a user does something), but poor for diagnosing workflow algorithm issues.

Yappi (Yet Another Python Profiler) is multithreading aware. cProfile which will show everything up to the exec, or run call. Yappi will profile the thread and show any slow points within the separate thread.

Note: This will not work with QThreads and may crash or be unable to profile inside. It is recommended you migrate workers by inheriting from IQtAsync, see ``async_qt_adaptor.py`` for details. Using native threading enables tooling, makes testing simple and produces readable stack traces.

To use Yappi instead of cProfile simple append –yappi to the list of arguments after profile, e.g.:

# If you do not have yappi installed
python3 -m pip install yappi --user
# Run with Yappi profiler
./MantidWorkbench --profile name_of_profile.out --yappi