Recently I wrote (in response to David Burney's question about performance
penalty (if any) for debugging mode in Cobol):

> Hmmmmm.  I also would like to know the answer to this.  We use the same
> method.  Although anecdotal evidence suggests that their is no performance
> penalty (at least, I haven't noticed one yet!), I would be interested in
> seeing some hard numbers on this.

Okay, so here's some hard data.  It appears that there is some performance
penalty associated with the DEBUGGING code.  One run of a program that reads
600,000 records from an Image dataset shows a cpu usage of 406.089 seconds
with debug code and 361.347 without the debug code, which is an increase of
44.742 seconds or 12.4%.

More testing to follow...


Jim Phillips                            Manager of Information Systems
E-Mail: [log in to unmask]     Therm-O-Link, Inc.
Phone: (330) 527-2124                   P. O. Box 285
  Fax: (330) 527-2123                   10513 Freedom Street
  Web: http://www.tolwire.com  Garrettsville, Ohio  44231

Jim Phillips                            Manager of Information Systems
E-Mail: [log in to unmask]     Therm-O-Link, Inc.
Phone: (330) 527-2124                   P. O. Box 285
  Fax: (330) 527-2123                   10513 Freedom Street
  Web: http://www.tolwire.com  Garrettsville, Ohio  44231