Pikos is a profiling and investigation tool suite for python applications. The name is inspired by Pikos Apikos the main character in a mid 80s Greek puppet TV series. Pikos was an investigative journalist assigned to find out about a missing person case in the remote and strange land of "Froutopia", a country populated by large fruits that can talk.

Key aims of Pikos are:

• Help identify areas of the an application that need to improve.
• Use, group and augment rather than replace commonly used tools like cProfile and line_profiler
• Provide effective memory monitoring throughout python.
• Be multi-platform.
• Provide real-time access to profile data and allow live analysis while the application is running.

The package requires a recent version of psutil (>=0.4.1):

python setup.py install

To build with the real-time fork of cProfile please provide the --with-real-time-lsprof before any setup command:

python setup.py --with-real-time-lsprof install

You will need a build of libzmq to compile and link against. If the needed files are not available at system default locations, they will need to be manually provided to the build_ext command:

python setup.py --with-real-time-lsprof build_ext -I <include directory for zmq> -L <libary directory for zmq>
python setup.py --with-real-time-lsprof install

or in one line as:

python setup.py --with-real-time-lsprof build_ext -I <include directory for zmq> -L <library directory for zmq> install

Finally to run the test suite please give:

python setup.py test

Optional packages of external profilers:

• yappi (>=0.62), http://code.google.com/p/yappi/
• line_profiler (>=1.0b3), http://pypi.python.org/pypi/line_profiler

Optional packages for the live monitoring tools:

• pyzmq (>= 2.1.11) http://www.zeromq.org/bindings:python
• traits (>= 4.1.0) https://github.com/enthought/traits
• traitsui (>= 4.1.0) https://github.com/enthought/traitsui
• pyface (>= 4.1.0 https://github.com/enthought/pyface
• envisage (>= 4.1.0 https://github.com/enthought/envisage
• chaco (>= 4.1.0) https://github.com/enthought/chaco
• numpy (>= 1.6.1) http://numpy.scipy.org