The Profiler utility enables you to obtain detailed statistics on the run-time performance of a COBOL application. In Visual COBOL, Profiler is integrated with the IDE.
To use Profiler with your applications, you must first enable Profiler in the properties of a project, then compile your project. This causes the Compiler to include code in your programs that produces performance statistics about each paragraph of the programs each time you run the application.
If a program contains no paragraphs, no report is produced for it.
The performance statistics produced by Profiler for that run of your application are saved in one or more files called program-name.ipf where program-name is the name of the program that was run. If an executable file is produced, then program-name is the first entry point name in the executable file. These performance statistics are in compact form and you use Profiler to convert them to a readable format saved as one or more .prf files.
For information about how to use the command-line version of the Profiler utility, see the Profiler reference topic.