django-speedinfo

django-speedinfo is a live profiling tool for Django projects to find the most high loaded views for the next optimization. django-speedinfo counts number of calls, cache hits, SQL queries, measures average and total call time and more for each of your views. Detailed report and profiler controls are available in Django admin.

Prerequisites

• Python 2.7, 3.6+
• Django 1.8+

Installation

pip install django-speedinfo

Upgrading from 1.x

Old profiling data will be unavailable after upgrading. Don't forget to export the data in advance.

• Setup one of the storage backends as shown in the section 4 of Setup below.
• SPEEDINFO_PROFILING_CONDITIONS is empty by default. If you use SPEEDINFO_EXCLUDE_URLS in your project you need to initialize the list of conditions explicitly: SPEEDINFO_PROFILING_CONDITIONS = ["speedinfo.conditions.exclude_urls.ExcludeURLCondition"]
• SPEEDINFO_REPORT_COLUMNS and SPEEDINFO_REPORT_COLUMNS_FORMAT were removed, use SPEEDINFO_ADMIN_COLUMNS instead. Every entry in SPEEDINFO_ADMIN_COLUMNS list is a tuple (column name, value format, attribute name). See Customize admin columns for details. To add extra columns follow the instruction in the section Extra admin columns below.
• speedinfo.settings module renamed to speedinfo.conf
• Base condition class was renamed from Condition to AbstractCondition

Setup

1. Add speedinfo to INSTALLED_APPS.
2. Add speedinfo.middleware.ProfilerMiddleware to the end of MIDDLEWARE (or MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES for Django < 1.10) list, but before django.middleware.cache.FetchFromCacheMiddleware (if used):

   MIDDLEWARE = [
       ...,
       "speedinfo.middleware.ProfilerMiddleware",
       "django.middleware.cache.FetchFromCacheMiddleware",
   ]
   

3. Setup any cache backend (except local-memory and dummy caching) using our proxy cache backend. django-speedinfo needs the cache to store profiler state between requests and to intercept calls to cache:

   CACHES = {
       "default": {
           "BACKEND": "speedinfo.backends.proxy_cache",
           "CACHE_BACKEND": "django.core.cache.backends.filebased.FileBasedCache",
           "LOCATION": "/var/tmp/django_cache",
       }
   }
   

4. Setup storage for profiling data. django-speedinfo comes with two storages to choose from:
   • Database storage
     1. Add speedinfo.storage.database to INSTALLED_APPS.
     2. Add SPEEDINFO_STORAGE = "speedinfo.storage.database.storage.DatabaseStorage" to project settings.
     3. Run python manage.py migrate.
   • Cache storage
     1. Add SPEEDINFO_STORAGE = "speedinfo.storage.cache.storage.CacheStorage" to project settings.
     2. Optionally you may define a separate cache in CACHES to store profiling data. To use it in CacheStorage assign SPEEDINFO_CACHE_STORAGE_CACHE_ALIAS to the appropriate cache alias. Example:

        CACHES = {
            "default": {
                "BACKEND": "speedinfo.backends.proxy_cache",
                "CACHE_BACKEND": "django.core.cache.backends.db.DatabaseCache",
                "LOCATION": "cache_table",
            },
            "speedinfo-storage": {
                "BACKEND": "django.core.cache.backends.memcached.MemcachedCache",
                "LOCATION": "127.0.0.1:11211",
            },
        })
        
        SPEEDINFO_CACHE_STORAGE_CACHE_ALIAS = "speedinfo-storage"
        

5. Run python manage.py collectstatic.

Usage

Open Views profiler in Django admin. Click the Turn on / Turn off button to control profiler state. Press Reset button to delete all profiling data.

Advanced features

Custom page caching

django-speedinfo automatically detects when Django use per-site caching via UpdateCacheMiddleware and FetchFromCacheMiddleware middlewares or per-view caching via cache_page decorator and counts cache hit when retrieving pages from the cache.

If you implement your own caching logic and want to mark the view response as obtained from the cache, add specified attribute to the HttpResponse object as shown below:

from django.views import View
from from speedinfo.conf import speedinfo_settings

class CachedView(View):
    def get(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        # ...
        # Assume that `response` was taken from the cache
        setattr(response, speedinfo_settings.SPEEDINFO_CACHED_RESPONSE_ATTR_NAME, True)
        return response

The default value of SPEEDINFO_CACHED_RESPONSE_ATTR_NAME is _is_cached. But you can override it if the attribute name is conflicts with your application logic.

Customize admin columns

SPEEDINFO_ADMIN_COLUMNS allows to control visibility and appearance of Django admin profiler columns. Every entry in the SPEEDINFO_ADMIN_COLUMNS list is a tuple of (column name, value format, ViewProfiler attribute name). Default value:

SPEEDINFO_ADMIN_COLUMNS = (
    ("View name", "{}", "view_name"),
    ("HTTP method", "{}", "method"),
    ("Anonymous calls", "{:.1f}%", "anon_calls_ratio"),
    ("Cache hits", "{:.1f}%", "cache_hits_ratio"),
    ("SQL queries per call", "{}", "sql_count_per_call"),
    ("SQL time", "{:.1f}%", "sql_time_ratio"),
    ("Total calls", "{}", "total_calls"),
    ("Time per call", "{:.8f}", "time_per_call"),
    ("Total time", "{:.4f}", "total_time"),
)

Extra admin columns

To add additional data to a storage and columns to admin follow the instruction:

1. Create custom storage backend which will hold or calculate additional fields.
2. Implement storage fetch_all() method that will return the list of the ViewProfiler instances initialized with the extra fields. Example:

   def fetch_all(self, ordering=None):
       ...
       return [
           ViewProfiler(view_name="...", method="...", ..., extra_field="...")
           ...
       ]
   

3. Implement sorting by extra fields in fetch_all() method.
4. Add extra fields to SPEEDINFO_ADMIN_COLUMNS as described in the section Customize admin columns.

Profiling conditions

SPEEDINFO_PROFILING_CONDITIONS allows to declare a list of condition classes to filter profiling views by some rules. By default SPEEDINFO_PROFILING_CONDITIONS is empty. django-speedinfo comes with one build-in condition - ExcludeURLCondition. It allows to exclude some urls from profiling by adding them to the SPEEDINFO_EXCLUDE_URLS list. Each entry in SPEEDINFO_EXCLUDE_URLS is a regex compatible expression to test requested url. Usage example:

SPEEDINFO_PROFILING_CONDITIONS = [
    "speedinfo.conditions.exclude_urls.ExcludeURLCondition",
]

SPEEDINFO_EXCLUDE_URLS = [
    r"/admin/",
    r"/news/$",
    r"/movie/\d+/$",
]

To define your own condition class, you must inherit from the base class speedinfo.conditions.base.AbstractCondition and implement all abstract methods. See ExcludeURLCondition source code for implementation example. Then add full path to your class to SPEEDINFO_PROFILING_CONDITIONS list as shown above. Conditions in mentioned list are executed in a top-down order. The first condition returning False interrupts the further check.

Custom storage backend

django-speedinfo comes with DatabaseStorage and CacheStorage. But you may want to write your own storage (e.g. for MongoDB, Redis or even file-based). First create the storage class based on speedinfo.storage.base.AbstractStorage and implement all abstract methods. See speedinfo.storage.cache.storage and speedinfo.storage.database.storage as an examples. Then add path to your custom storage class to the project settings SPEEDINFO_STORAGE = "path.to.module.CustomStorage". Use our tests to make sure that everything works as intended (you need to clone repository to get access to the tests package):

from django.test import TestCase, override_settings
from tests.test_storage import StorageTestCase

@override_settings(
    SPEEDINFO_STORAGE="path.to.module.CustomStorage",
    SPEEDINFO_TESTS=True,
)
class CustomStorageTestCase(StorageTestCase, TestCase):
    pass

Notice

The number of SQL queries measured by django-speedinfo may differ from the values of django-debug-toolbar for the same view. It happens because django-speedinfo shows the average number of SQL queries for each view. Also profiler doesn't take into account SQL queries made in the preceding middlewares.