"If you're looking for a moderate size self-contained task, writing a replacement for the profile and pstats modules that worked directly with hotshot data would be a nice little project. Right now, to use hotshot data, you have to load it up and turn it into profile-compatible data - for any decent amount of data, this takes a _lot_ of time. Plus, the existing profiler API is extremely unpythonic."

So said Anthony Baxter.

Note that a patch for an alternate profiler already exists: [http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1212837&group_id=5470&atid=305470 patch #1212837].