Question

We use a library provided by another internal team. (Shaky analogy starts now)

from externalTeam import dataCreator
datacreator.createPizza()
datacreator.createBurger()
datacreator.createHotDog()

Recently we found a single method of theirs was taking over a minute to execute in certain situations. To debug this, I had to go into our code and add timeouts around every call of this method.

import time
from externalTeam import dataCreator
start = time.clock()
datacreator.createPizza()
stop = time.clock()
print "It took %s seconds to perform createPizza" % (str(stop-start))

In hindsight, that’s because we’re calling createPizza all over the place, and we don’t control createPizza itself (the analogy is starting to break down a little here). I’d rather just call createPizza in one place, and be able to add a timer around that. My first thought to accomplish this would be to create a wrap all their methods in my own wrapper class. That’s the opposite of DRY though, and anytime they add another method I’d have to update our library to wrap that as well:

import time
from externalTeam import dataCreator
def createPizza(self):
    start = time.clock()
    datacreator.createPizza()
    stop = time.clock()
    print "It took %s seconds to perform createPizza" % (str(stop-start))

def createBurger(self):
    start = time.clock()
    datacreator.createPizza()
    stop = time.clock()
    print "It took %s seconds to perform createBurger" % (str(stop-start))

def createHotDog(self):
    start = time.clock()
    datacreator.createPizza()
    stop = time.clock()
    print "It took %s seconds to perform createHotDog" % (str(stop-start))    

What I want is a way to always execute a few lines of code around every function that’s being called from dataCreator. There must be some way to do that through an intermediate class whose methods can be dynamically defined – or rather left undefined, right?

Answer 1

I would create a dataCreator adapter class that would work like this:

1. Have a methods2wrap list of the methods from dataCreator that needs to be wrapped into the debugging/timing functionality.
2. Have an overridden __getattribute__() that would map 1:1 onto the dataCreator methods, wrapping the methods in methods2wrap into a timing debug message.

Proof-of-concept code (the example wrap the class list and insert a debugging timestamp around its method append).

import time

class wrapper(list):

    def __getattribute__(self, name):
        TO_OVERRIDE = ['append']
        if name in TO_OVERRIDE:
            start = time.clock()
        ret = super(list, self).__getattribute__(name)
        if name in TO_OVERRIDE:
            stop = time.clock()
            print "It took %s seconds to perform %s" % (str(stop-start), name)
        return ret

profiled_list = wrapper('abc')
print profiled_list
profiled_list.append('d')
print profiled_list
profiled_list.pop()
print profiled_list

Of course you could build on this example and make it parametric, so that at initialisation time you can set what class to wrap and what methods should be timed…

EDIT: Note that TO_OVERRIDE is reassigned at each __getattribute__ call. This is by design. If you you would make it as a class attribute, __getattribute__ would recursively loop (you should use an explicit call to the parent __getattribute__ method to retrieve it, but this would probably be slower than simply rebuild the list from scratch.

HTH