Frank Marge writes:

>We are looking for a tool to help us write efficient code. I remember a
>product called SPT3000 from hp that does something along that line. Does
>anyone have info on that product, or on any other products out there.

We use SPT3000 here; it's a very valuable tool for finding performance
problems in application software. I've only used it with C and Pascal,
however; I assume it would work as well in Fortran, but I'm not so sure
about COBOL.

SPT/3000 provides breakdowns of the time spent in selected system
intrinsics as well as breakdowns to the instruction level of the time
spent in application code. It's a statistical sampling system rather than
an instrumentation system, so there can be some inaccuracies when dealing
with synchronous events. However, this shouldn't be a problem for most
application software. It has certainly proved its worth here: in one
case, some "harmless" debugging code left in a production application
"just in case" turned out to be responsible for 15% of the application's
total CPU time.

-- Bruce


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