keke

This project is an extremely simple trace-event writer for Python.

You can read the traces in Perfetto or chrome's about:tracing. This only writes the consensus dialect that works in both, and is tiny enough to just vendor on the off-chance that you want tracing in the future.

If your needs are more like a line profiler, you might want either pytracing (slightly abandoned, the git version does work in py3) or viztracer (unsuitable for vendoring in other projects due to size, but actively maintained).

I drew inspiration from both in writing this.

Simple Example

from __future__ import annotations  # for IO[str]

from typing import IO, Optional
import time

import click

@click.command()
@click.option("--trace", type=click.File(mode="w"), help="Trace output filename")
@click.option("--foo", help="This value gets logged")
def main(trace: Optional[IO[str]], foo: Optional[str]) -> None:
    with keke.TraceOutput(file=trace):
        with kev("main", __name__, foo=foo):
            sub()

def sub():
    with kev("sub1", __name__):
        time.sleep(1)
    with kev("sub2", __name__):
        time.sleep(2)

Overhead

Very close to zero when not enabled.

The easiest way to not-enable is call TraceOutput(file=None) which will do nothing.

Processes, or "how to get to distributed tracing"

This approach avoids all magic.

If you're calling another (trace-aware) program, then the simplest thing to do is come up with a unique name and pass that to the child in argv, then attempt to merge that yourself once it's done.

If you're doing something like fork/spawn to continue python work, then the parent can control basic information (like the tmpdir to write to) and the child can open a unique file with its pid.

If you're doing something more distributed, you might come up with a guid and pass that to the child instead, for the child to tag it for later log uploading.

What's with the name

I was trying to come up with a short, memorable name and some of the rendered trace points were very pointy, which reminded me of the "bouba/kiki effect." The name "kiki" was taken but "keke" was not.

License

keke is copyright Tim Hatch, and licensed under the MIT license. I am providing code in this repository to you under an open source license. This is my personal repository; the license you receive to my code is from me and not from my employer. See the LICENSE file for details.