Mastering Python High Performance

Profiling best practices

Profiling is a repetitive task. You'll do it several times inside the same project in order to get the best results, and you'll do it again on the next project. Just like with any other repetitive task in software development, there is a set of best practices you can follow to ensure that you get the most out of the process. Let's look at some of them:

Build a regression-test suite

Before starting any kind of optimization process, you need to make sure that the changes you make to the code will not affect its functioning in a bad way. The best way to do this, especially when it's a big code base, is to create a test suite. Make sure that your code coverage is high enough to provide the confidence you need to make the changes. ...