cProfileProfile

cProfileProfile is not a standard term in Python documentation. In common practice, it usually refers to the profile data produced by the cProfile module, or informally to the Profile class within that module. The canonical names to use are cProfile for the module and Profile for the class used to collect profiling data.

What it does: cProfile is a built-in Python profiler that records the time spent in individual functions and the number of calls. It uses a high-performance C implementation and produces data suitable for statistical analysis. The collected data can be analyzed with the pstats module or printed directly to an output stream.

Usage: You can create a Profile object, enable profiling, run code, then disable and inspect results. Typical patterns include creating a Profile instance, calling enable, executing the target code, calling disable, and then printing or saving the statistics. There is also a convenience function cProfile.run for quick one-liners that execute code under profiling.

Output and analysis: The profiler provides per-function metrics such as total time, cumulative time, and call counts. Using the pstats.Stats interface, users can sort results by different criteria (time, calls, etc.), filter by function, and export data for reporting. The output is well-suited for identifying hot paths in Python code.

Limitations: Profiling introduces overhead and can slightly affect execution times. It primarily profiles Python-level code and may not equally reflect the performance characteristics of native C extensions. Profiling multi-threaded code requires careful interpretation, as results can aggregate from multiple threads.

See also: cProfile, Profile (cProfile), pstats, statistics.