Benchmarking your Application

During the design and development stages of your application, you should think about what constitutes acceptable performance when your application will be running in a production environment; for example, should the application:

• provide the same performance as it did on a previous platform, or;
• run at an acceptable speed when a certain number of users are active, or;
• some other criteria.

As you develop your application, the Profiler utility is a useful tool to obtain detailed statistics on the run-time performance of your native COBOL programs. As you near the end of the development phase, use third-party applications (for example, perf on UNIX, or the in-built performance analysis tool in Visual COBOL on Windows) to produce detailed statistics on your application as a whole. Use the statistics that these tools produce as your benchmarking results. In addition, you should record the following:

• The Compiler directives set on compilation.
• The environment variables and switches present during run time.
• The version and service pack of the operating system.
• The processor type and memory (physical and virtual) available.
• A list of other applications and programs running at the same time.
• Virtual machine configuration details (if part of the setup).