The Profiler

To help you tune application performance, the runtime includes an execution profiling facility. This built-in facility is activated when a properly prepared program is executed with the -p flag, prompting the runtime to collect information about I/O operations and CALLs, and to install a timer to track the amount of time spent in different parts of the code. All of this information is placed into an output file called acumon#.xml. (The # is an automatically incremented number, starting at 1, appended to the filename to ensure that the profile data is not accidentally overwritten by another execution of the profiler.)

Note: Because the runtime performs a linear search to determine the next available filename to use, if a directory contains a large number of profiler output files, the search can take some time. For this reason, it is a good idea to remove unneeded XML profiles regularly.

The raw data in acumon#.xml can be processed by the acuprof utility to create a text-based performance report, acumon.rpt. In all environments, the report summarizes the amount of processor time used by each program in an application and each paragraph in a program, as well as detailing the file I/O operations performed by each program. When the acumon#.xml file is created by a UNIX/Linux runtime, the final report also contains information about the amount of user time spent in each program and paragraph.