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.
In order to use Profiler with your applications, you must first enable Profiler in the properties of a project, a build configuration or a file, 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. To produce Profiler reports, you need to create a run configuration that has Profiler enabled, and then execute the application with it.
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.
The Profiler report file, .prf, is created in a subfolder of your project.
The IDE also produces a Profiler report when your project has dependencies on other projects that have profiling enabled. In such cases, the Profiler report file is saved in a subfolder of the project that contains the main program specified in the launch configuration.
For information about how to use the Profiler utility from the command line, see Profiler in the General Reference section of this product help.