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Damian Krystkiewicz
Damian Krystkiewicz

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Speeding up Python debugger 80x

Python debugger is a great tool which can save a lot of development time. Unfortunately it is extremely slow which makes a lot of people reluctant to use for bigger projects.

I decided to add some serious optimisations to it and got some amazing results which is about 80x speed up. Now execution and startup time is the same as without using debugger.

This feature is available for my project https://github.com/reloadware/reloadium
Also for the PyCharm plugin
https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/18509-reloadium--hot-reloading--profiling-for-python

Image description

This comes with a limitation though:

  • Only functions that have breakpoints in them will be debugged (by default python debugger traces everything even standard library)

This feature should still be very useful when we only want to investigate couple of functions.

Other reloadium features like hot reloading will also work in fast debug mode.

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