Spyder Line Profiler

Spyder-Line-Profiler is a plugin to run the Python line profiler. This package profiles the time that individual lines of code take to execute.

Installing the Line Profiler

If you installed Spyder using conda, the best way to obtain Spyder-Line-Profiler is to run the following command in your terminal (or Anaconda prompt on Windows):

conda install spyder-line-profiler -c spyder-ide

Important

At the moment it is not possible to use this plugin with the Spyder Standalone installers for Windows and macOS. We’re working to add support for them in the future.

Restart Spyder in order to be able to use the plugin.

Using the Line Profiler

When the Line Profiler is installed, it will be available under the menu item View ‣ Panes ‣ Line Profiler.

You will see it then as a tab next to the Files tab. For the Line Profiler to work, you must place the @profile decorator on the line above any functions that you wish to profile.

Now that the decorators have been added, you can then either select a script with the button present in the pane or run the profiler from Run ‣ Profile line by line. Your file will then be profiled line by line.

After running the profiler, either from the button in the pane or the Run menu, the results are shown in the Line Profiler pane. The path displayed there is that of the file being profiled.

The Line Profiler pane shows six columns:

• Line #: the number of the line being profiled.

• Hits: how many times that line is hit in the scope.

• Time (ms): time spent running the line in total for all hits, in milliseconds.

• Per hit (ms): average time spent per hit, in milliseconds.

• % Time: percentage of time taken by that line of total scope time.

• Line contents: the source code in the line.

Lines with a stronger color take more time to run.

Spyder Plugins Spyder Notebook