Profiling is the analysis of a program to measure things like memory usage, function call frequency and duration, and time complexity. Python has several profiling tools, including line_profiler which measures the time spent on each line of code. Line_profiler was initially released in 2008 and has continued to be updated for compatibility with newer Python versions. It can be installed with pip or from source code. To use it, the @profile decorator is added before functions to time, and then kernprof and line_profiler are run on the code to generate output showing time spent and hits for each line. This output helps identify slow parts of code to optimize program performance.