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Comment by anyzen | Hacker News Reader

Off topic: this is the same Brendan Gregg of flame charts fame [0][1]. It has solved my skin quite a few times when trying to figure out performance bottlenecks in Python apps (using pyflame[2] to capture data and FlameGraph[1] to convert it to displayable SVG).

[0] http://www.brendangregg.com/flamegraphs.html

[1] https://github.com/brendangregg/FlameGraph

[2] https://github.com/uber-archive/pyflame

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Looks like `pyflame` was recently deprecated & archived.

I've had success using `py-spy` for debugging perf issues. Flamegraphs are much nicer to work with than cProfile's output.

https://github.com/benfred/py-spy

I just wrote up a quick survey of python profilers that hasn't been published yet, and along with py-spy, there is austin (https://github.com/P403n1x87/austin). The thing that I liked the most about austin is that it also samples the memory usage of the system so that you have the context of the world outside of the process being sampled, in case it is useful. That said, py-spy is easier to install (it can be installed via pip).

Facebook also appears to have published BPF to do the same thing as py-spy but in kernel on perf hooks. But isn’t currently well documented to be easily accessible as far as I can tell.

I plan to test it out but hadn’t yet.

For anyone that wants to understand how py-spy works id also suggest the talk on rbspy (see YouTube) it’s great and basically the same but for ruby.

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