Using cProfile Preferred Profiler

Python includes a profiler called cProfile. This is generally preferred over using timeit.

It breaks down your entire script and for each method in your script it tells you:

• ncalls: The number of times a method was called
• tottime: Total time spent in the given function (excluding time made in calls to sub-functions)
• percall: Time spent per call. Or the quotient of tottime divided by ncalls
• cumtime: The cumulative time spent in this and all subfunctions (from invocation till exit). This figure is accurate even for recursive functions.
• percall: is the quotient of cumtime divided by primitive calls
• filename:lineno(function): provides the respective data of each function

The cProfiler can be easily called on Command Line using:

$ python -m cProfile main.py

To sort the returned list of profiled methods by the time taken in the method:

$ python -m cProfile -s time main.py