Someone (forget who) mentioned recently that you could get some "poor man's" profiling info by attaching to a running python with gdb, and periodically grabbing a stack trace.
I figured out that there's a handy way to do this with this command: watch -n 1 'pstack 30154 | tac' which will show a full-screen stack dump once per second on the python with pid 30154. (It works with non-Python, too--the 'p' is apparently for "process", not "python".) If the interesting part runs off the bottom of your screen, you can always leave off the tac, though that makes it a bit jumpier. (pstack uses the ptrace interface, which may annoy the parents of this process if they're paying attention (which is not usually the case).) Have fun, Mike -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list