Profiling

If you want to measure the performance of a ROS2 python node you can use the following procedure.

• Create a profile and save it in a file
• Visualise the profile with snakeviz (which you can install with pip3)

To gather the performance of a node you can use cProfile: https://docs.python.org/3/library/profile.html You can either create a profile within your code like this:

import cProfile
profile = cProfile()
profile.enable()
# do stuff
profile.disable()
profile.dump_stats("FILENAME")

or by profiling the whole execution of the node by including the following line in the launch file:

Node(
     package='...',
     executable='...',
     prefix=f"python3 -m cProfile -o FILENAME",
     namespace=...,
     ...)

The profile can be viewed by calling snakeviz -s FILENAME on the command line. The program will create a webserver and serve a website where the data is shown. To get to the website follow the link given in the command-line.