timeline

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python-timeline: Modelling of a series of actions

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Copyright (c) 2011, Canonical Ltd

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, version 3 only.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

The timeline package provides a way to model a series of actions. For instance, during a web request the appserver might call out to a number of backend services, make sql queries and memcached lookups. All of these actions can be tracked in a single timeline, and that serialised or analysed for slow points.

Dependencies

• Python 2.6+

• pytz

Testing Dependencies

• subunit (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-subunit) (optional)

• testtools (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/testtools)

Usage

Create a timeline object:

from timeline.timeline import TimeLine log = TimeLine()

Then add actions:

action = log.start('mycategory', 'mydetails')

Perform your action and then tell the action it has finished:

action.finish()

At this point you can start another action. If you wish to nest actions, pass allow_nested=True to start().

One of the things needed when working with timelines in complex applications is locating the right one. Timeline provides a helper for WSGI apps:

from timeline import wsgi app = wsgi.make_app(inner_app)

Calls to app will now inject a 'timeline.timeline' variable into the wsgi environwhich can be used by inner_app to record actions.

Installation

Either run setup.py in an environment with all the dependencies available, or add the working directory to your PYTHONPATH.

Development

Upstream development takes place at https://launchpad.net/python-timeline. To setup a working area for development, if the dependencies are not immediately available, you can use ./bootstrap.py to create bin/buildout, then bin/py to get a python interpreter with the dependencies available.

To run the tests use the runner of your choice, the test suite is timeline.tests.test_suite.

For instance::

$ bin/py -m testtools.run timeline.tests.test_suite

If you have testrepository you can run the tests with testr::

$ testr run