Optimal performance is, needless to say, crucial for real-time embedded systems. Measuring performance can be quite difficult, however, particularly when it comes to determining the specific functional bottlenecks in your system.
That's where performance profiling monitors come in. These tools watch your application as it executes, measuring statistics such as:
How often a function is called
How long it takes for that function to execute
Which functions are the bottlenecks of your application
With this information you can optimize your code, ensuring all real-time constraints placed upon your system are accommodated.
This function is provided in IBM Rational Test RealTime by the performance profiling feature for the Java language.
Next: Code coverage