ProgressMeter.jl

Progress meter for long-running operations in Julia

Installation

Within julia, execute

Pkg.add("ProgressMeter")

Usage

Progress meters for tasks with a pre-determined number of steps

This works for functions that process things in loops. Here's a demonstration of how to use it:

using ProgressMeter

@showprogress 1 "Computing..." for i in 1:50
    sleep(0.1)
end

This will use a minimum update interval of 1 second, and show the ETA and final duration. If your computation runs so quickly that it never needs to show progress, no extraneous output will be displayed.

The @showprogress macro wraps a for loop or comprehension, as long as the object being iterated over implements the length method. This macro will correctly handle any continue statements in a for loop as well.

You can also control progress updates and reports manually:

function my_long_running_function(filenames::Array)
    n = length(filenames)
    p = Progress(n, 1)   # minimum update interval: 1 second
    for f in filenames
        # Here's where you do all the hard, slow work
        next!(p)
    end
end

For tasks such as reading file data where the progress increment varies between iterations, you can use update!:

using ProgressMeter

function readFileLines(fileName::String)
    file = open(fileName,"r")

    seekend(file)
    fileSize = position(file)

    seekstart(file)
    p = Progress(fileSize, 1)   # minimum update interval: 1 second
    while !eof(file)
        line = readline(file)
        # Here's where you do all the hard, slow work

        update!(p, position(file))
    end
end

Optionally, a description string can be specified which will be prepended to the output, and a progress meter M characters long can be shown. E.g.

p = Progress(n, 1, "Computing initial pass...", 50)

will yield

Computing initial pass...53%|███████████████████████████                       |  ETA: 0:09:02

in a manner similar to python-progressbar.

Also, other properties can be modified through keywords. The glyphs used in the bar may be specified by passing a BarGlyphs object as the keyword argument barglyphs. The BarGlyphs constructor can either take 5 characters as arguments or a single 5 character string. E.g.

p = Progress(n, dt=0.5, barglyphs=BarGlyphs("[=> ]"), barlen=50, color=:yellow)

will yield

Progress: 53%[==========================>                       ]  ETA: 0:09:02

Progress meters for tasks with an unknown number of steps

Some tasks only terminate when some criterion is satisfied, for example to achieve convergence within a specified tolerance. In such circumstances, you can use the ProgressThresh type:

prog = ProgressThresh(1e-5, "Minimizing:")
for val in logspace(2, -6, 20)
    ProgressMeter.update!(prog, val)
    sleep(0.1)
end

This will display progress until val drops below the threshold value (1e-5).

Printing additional information

You can also print and update information related to the computation by using the showvalues keyword. The following example displays the iteration counter and the value of a dummy variable x below the progress meter:

x,n = 1,10
p = Progress(n)
for iter = 1:10
    x *= 2
    sleep(0.5)
    ProgressMeter.next!(p; showvalues = [(:iter,iter), (:x,x)])
end

Credits

Thanks to Alan Bahm, Andrew Burroughs, and Jim Garrison for major enhancements to this package.