How to profile django application with respect to execution time?

I would recommend writing some integration tests instead, or at least using the built in testing client to automate requests and put lots of debugging statements in the views

Django has a built in testing client:

from django.test.client import Client
c = Client()
response = c.post('/slow_url/')

And then in your view:

def slow_url(request):
    start = time.time()
    print 'Started db query'
    result = SomeComplexModel.objects.all()
    print 'Finished db query, took ', time.time() - start
    return render('some_complex_template.html', {'result': result})  

Automating the process of making requests and being able to replicate them again and again while you make small changes is how you will improve your code. CPU time can be worked out if you measure the time it takes to run each function. It won't take you long to hone in on the part that is actually chewing up resources.

Finally figured out a way to profile my django webapp :

Following 2 django snippets provide middleware that profile the whole flow and outputs if request has prof in GET keys :

• http://djangosnippets.org/snippets/727/ [ Uses cProfile ]

• http://djangosnippets.org/snippets/186/ [ Uses hotshot ]

Plain and simple profiling - Saved my day !

django-debug-toolbar 2.0

By default, django-debug-toolbar 2.0 includes 'debug_toolbar.panels.profiling.ProfilingPanel' in the settings DEBUG_TOOLBAR_PANELS. You can view this profiling information by ticking the "Profiling" checkbox in the toolbar and refreshing the page.

Old versions of django-debug-toolbar:

You can try the profiling panel of the django-debug-toolbar (make sure you use the application's latest version from github). Enable the panel like so in your settings.py:

DEBUG_TOOLBAR_PANELS = (
  'debug_toolbar.panels.version.VersionDebugPanel',
  'debug_toolbar.panels.timer.TimerDebugPanel',
  'debug_toolbar.panels.profiling.ProfilingDebugPanel',
)

This existence of this panel is not documented on the readme of django-debug-toolbar; that's why I answer here in the first place.