Linesman Documentation

linesman is a profiler for WSGI applications. It installs as middleware, can be configured entirely from any paster config, and aims to be a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to profiling WSGI apps.

Unfortunately, there are only a few profilers available for Python, with the fastest and generally most popular one being cProfile. However, the output can be very difficult to analyze without having substantial knowledge about what’s going on in an application, which makes it difficult to use.

There are a few select profile wrappers out there–repoze.profile, keas.profile, and dozer (which is still in alpha) all come to mind, but all either wrap the output from cProfile itself, or show incomplete information. Linesman aims to right this wrong.

Overview

This is the central hub for all Linesman documentation. It covers:

  • instructions on how to setup middleware
  • how to view the on-the-fly graphs and statistics

Things it does not cover are:

  • interpreting profiling data
  • memory leaks
  • how to improve your application’s response time

To run unittests:

$ python setup.py nosetests

To build this documentation:

$ easy_install sphinx
[...]
$ python setup.py build_sphinx

The built documentation is available (by default) in build/sphinx/html, and can be viewed locally on your web browser without the need for a separate web server.

Index and Glossary

Table Of Contents

Next topic

Configuring Linesman

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