The QGIS Profiler Plugin aims to extend QGIS Profiler development tool to be able to profile plugins and QGIS itself easily.
- Broader python api for profiling
- See the API documentation
- Ability to filter and search profile events
- A feature to record profiler events and various meters
- A feature to record any python code with cProfile (if installed in the system)
- Ability to save the profile results into a stats file for further analysis
- Performance meters for detecting anomalies (recovery time, thread health, map rendering)
- Settings to control the behavior
Install the plugin from the QGIS plugin repository or download the zip from the repository releases.
Open QGIS Development Tools and navigate to the Profiler tab. The plugin extends the built-in profiler panel with additional controls.
Click the Record button in the profiler panel, then interact with QGIS normally (pan, zoom, identify features, etc.). The profiler captures timing data for each interaction. Stop recording to inspect the results in the profiler tree.
Use the filter text field to search for specific events by name. Adjust the time threshold spinner to hide events below a certain duration, making it easy to focus on bottlenecks and ignore noise.
Click the Save button to export profiling data as a .prof file. This format
is compatible with standard Python profiling tools such as
gprof2dot and
snakeviz for further analysis
and visualization.
Toggle the cProfile button (Python icon) to record Python-level profiling data. This captures detailed call stacks and timing for all Python code executed while active. Results are logged to the console and can be saved to a stats file.
To profile an entire plugin lifecycle, use the @cprofile_plugin decorator:
from qgis_profiler.decorators import cprofile_plugin
@cprofile_plugin()
class MyPlugin:
def initGui(self):
...
def unload(self):
...Use the @profile decorator to measure individual functions or @profile_class
to instrument all methods in a class:
from qgis_profiler.decorators import profile, profile_class
@profile
def my_slow_function():
...
@profile_class(exclude=["_private_method"])
class MyProcessor:
def process(self):
...Results appear in the profiler tree under the configured group name.
The plugin includes three performance meters that can detect anomalies automatically:
- Recovery Meter -- measures how long QGIS takes to recover after a freeze
- Thread Health Checker -- monitors main thread responsiveness via pinging
- Map Rendering Meter -- tracks map canvas rendering time
Enable and calibrate meters in Settings. Use the Calibrate button to auto-adjust thresholds to your system's baseline performance.
- QGIS version 3.40 or higher including QGIS 4.
Full documentation is available at profiler-qgis-plugin.readthedocs.io.
Contributions are welcome! Feel free to open issues or submit pull requests.
See development readme for details.
These awesome plugins are used as inspiration for the plugin structure:
- https://github.com/nlsfi/pickLayer
- https://github.com/nlsfi/segment-reshape-qgis-plugin
- https://github.com/osgeosuomi/pytest-qgis
Licensed under GNU GPL v3.0.
Copyright (C) 2025-2026 profiler-qgis-plugin contributors.