November Presentation Night

Hosted at Formlabs (https://formlabs.com), who are also sponsoring pizza.

Sarah Bennedsen, Sensors

Prototyping sensing system behaviors and algorithms, and interfacing with sensing and measurement devices using Python.

Emin Martinian, Statistical Profiling

Profiling is measuring how often and how long various parts of your program are executed. Profiling is useful to understand what makes your program slow and how you can improve it. After a quick review of deterministic profiling tools and techniques, I will describe how you can do statistical profiling with existing packages or write your own from scratch.

Statistical profilers occasionally sample what your program is doing instead of watching each line or function. By using a moderate sampling frequency, you can profile your production code with almost no overhead. This lets you find the actual bottlenecks in real use cases.

The core technical focus of the talk is Python's sys module and how it lets you easily examine a running program. I also describe some tricks to be aware of related to threading, context switches, locks, and so on. At the conclusion of the talk, you will hopefully understand how to use an existing statistical profiler or write a customized version yourself.