Appendix C. Performance Results
The example programs have shown a variety of alternative techniques for carrying out the same tasks, such as file copying and ASCII to Unicode file conversion, and it is natural to speculate about the performance advantages of these techniques. Application design requires knowledge of, rather than speculation about, the performance impacts of alternative implementations and the potential performance advantages of various Windows versions, hardware configurations, and Windows features, such as threads and asynchronous I/O. The timep program, Program 6-2, measures the real (elapsed) time, user time, and system (kernel) time required to execute a program and provides a convenient way to measure performance and determine the effects of alternative programming techniques and designs.