Ted, A general technique I have used successfully to estimate the CPU usage (or instruction path length) of a "black box" piece of code is as follows:
(1) Measure the resource usage of the standard job - call this R1 (2) Modify the job (in the case your COBOL program) to call the "black box" subroutine N *extra* times -- that is a total of (N+1) calls. Choose a large value of N to give you greater precision or a small value of N to reduce the total resource usage. (3) Measure the resource usage of the modified job - call this R2. Then the average resource use of the black box = (R2-R1)/N This technique has one major inaccuracy -- any sort of caching will inevitably reduce the resource usage of the extra calls and leads to an underestimate. In the past I have used this method to decide whether or not to re-write a piece of "black box" code to optimize it. In many cases the difference between R1 and R2 was so small that I had no "business case" to open the "black box". Sorry, I haven't answered your question, however I hope this might help you. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
