Profiling in Python: Who called the function?

Question

I\'m profiling in Python using cProfile. I found a function that takes a lot of CPU time. How do I find out which function is calling this heavy function the mo

Answer 1

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])