Add profiler/benchmark module

[danielhuppmann]

Please confirm that this PR has done the following:

• Tests Added
• Documentation Added
• Name of contributors Added to AUTHORS.rst
• Description in RELEASE_NOTES.md Added

Description of PR

This PR adds a "profile" module collecting some utility code for benchmarking and profile tests that I used for working on #580. This module is not intended to be tested or executed automatically as part of the CI/CD

[codecov]

Codecov Report

Merging #583 (abd65ba) into main (151e330) will not change coverage.
The diff coverage is n/a.

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  Hits        5004    5004           
  Misses       335     335           

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[phackstock]

Looks good over all, some comments from my side.

[phackstock]

Does the profile module need its own .gitignore?

[danielhuppmann]

I thought that it's better to keep this as separate as possible for now - maybe we'll find that another package like memory-profiler is actually better for our use case...

[phackstock]

Would it not make sense to add this as an installation option to setup.py? Perhaps under EXTRA_REQUIREMENTS under the key benchmark or something along those lines?

[danielhuppmann]

Similar to the previous reply: I'd keep all changes related to profiling contained in this folder for now, to avoid that we switch to another profiling solution but have stray/outdated references in other parts of the package.

[danielhuppmann]

Thanks for the suggestions, @phackstock: my strategy here was to keep all changes related to profiling contained within this folder until we have figured out whether pytest-monitor is indeed the best solution for our use case. I also did some more experiments with memory-profiler...

I suggest to merge this PR as is and then continue working on performance improvements and other benchmarking/profiling tests.

[phackstock]

@danielhuppmann sounds like a sensible approach to me. Having a benchmarking suite as part of the main branch of pyam is a good thing for sure. From my side we are good to merge.
We just should keep in mind to eventually move the .gitignore and the dependencies into the main program once we have a stable benchmarking environment. Maybe it's worth putting a note into the README that the benchmarking is still a work in progress for now.

[danielhuppmann]

Added a note to the module-readme per suggestion by @phackstock

[danielhuppmann]

Merging as is this is only an exploratory, work-in-progress module with no interconnection to the existing functionality of the package.