.. _`sec:profiling`:

Profiling
=========

The section about  :ref:`buit-in types <sec:std_struct_methods>` showed some **asymptotic complexities**. 
The asymptotic complexity is a way to describe the efficiency of an algorithm in terms of input size :math:`n` as it approaches infinity. 
It expresses how the runtime (or space usage) of an algorithm grows relative to the size of the input, ignoring constant factors and lower-order terms. 
The theoretical complexities are useful information to extrapolate the expected required resources (time and memory). 
A section will be dedicated to these theoretical :ref:`complexities <sec:complexity>`. 

However, it must be complemented by a more **empirical approach** consisting in directly measuring the cpu time and memory usage: profiling. 
This is especially required during an optimization phase where intuition of performance bottle-neck tasks is often poor. 


.. toctree::
    :maxdepth: 2

    cpu 
    mem