JIMI

A quick tutorial in profiling and other new tools in jBASE 4.1 to answer this question and I hope be of interest to others. I've used an old version of jBASE 4.1, I hope things haven't changed too much, if at all.

First I have to re-iterate, in answer to your first question, there is a huge change between jBASE 4.0 and 4.1 . They should really have been assigned completely different release numbers such as 4.0 and 5.0 but for historic reasons this didn't happen. For example , 4.1 has jQL completely rewritten , there is no jPML demon and the list of differences is huge. So, it should not be any surprise when anything major changes.

The -JP was removed and added to the JDIAG environment variable in order to add some consistency to these bits and bobs. You can see a quick summary of the JDIAG environment variable by setting it to HELP and running any jBASE command. For example, from a Unix shell,

greg: JDIAG=HELP WHO
JDIAG=option{:option{:option ...}}
option can be one of ...
profile={off|short|long|user|jcover|all}
filename={stdout|stderr|tmp|pathname{,refresh_mins}
(%p in pathname is substituted with process id)
(%t in pathname is substituted with time stamp)
memory={off|on|verify}
branch={off|on|verbose}
jimi={database|open|fileio|branch|call|perform|transaction|all|verbose}
help
0 greg

So to profile a program, from a Unix shell, you would export the JDIAG environment variable, run the command, and then un-export the environment variable. This last stage is important to stop your profile file being overwritten.

For example, from a Unix shell, to profile an application and look at the profile results

greg: export JDIAG=profile=long:filename=fb1.out
greg: MYPROG
greg: unset JDIAG
greg: ls -l fb1.out
-rw-rw-r-- 1 greg greg 742 Mar 7 09:04 fb1.out
greg: jprof -fMYSOURCES fb1.out

In the above example you are telling jBASE you want long profiling and to send the output trace to the file fb1.out. Once the application is run you want to examine the file using the jprof command.

On a Unix shell you can replace 3 of the lines above with a single line which will set the JDIAG variable only for the invokation of a single command, as in

greg:JDIAG=profile=long:filename=fb1.out MYPROG

On Windows you replace the JDIAG command delimiter from a colon ":" prompt to a semi-colon prompt ";" , well that's from memory so I might be wrong. Also, because certain timing signals aren't available on Windows, the 'profile=long' will not generate the correct output but most of the other JDIAG options will work.

You might like to try this one

greg: export JDIAG=branch=long MYPROG

This will show you all the external branches (CALL, PERFORM etc.) and because no "filename" was specified, the output comes to the screen. Of course you could modify the line like this to send the output to a file

greg: export JDIAG=branch=long:filename=fb1.out MYPROG

Another option you might like to try is this

greg: JDIAG=jimi=all:filename=fb1.out MYPROG

This creates all sorts of information into an output file, try it and see if it is useful. I don't think there is any automated tool to collate the information, you have to anyalyse it yourself.

A nice feature of 4.1 allows this JIMI diagnostic information to be turned on and off on-the-fly on a running process. For example, if you have a background job you want to examine, or a user's application has gone into a loop, you can turn JIMI on from another port using this

greg: jprof -j ON 23 fb1.out all

Well, I think that's the correct syntax, use "jprof -h". This will turn on the JIMI trace on port 23 , send the output to file fb1.out, and will collate all JIMI information (see the output using JDIAG=HELP for options to jimi)

I hope this short class helps