Abstract: Understanding a third-party vendor's benchmark can be difficult when its source code is proprietary. In particular, the factors on which the benchmark's score depend can not easily be discovered. Furthermore, the sensitivity of the score to the execution speed of various components of the benchmark, which is important for optimizing the score in a competitive environment, is not readily accessible. The present invention shows how insertion of known delays into selected components of a benchmark can be used to elucidate its computational structure, profile it, find the sensitivity of its score to the time spent in a functional component. In all these uses of the present invention, execution of a predetermined amount of code is used to introduce a known delay into a target function or Java method. The benchmark is then re-executed to determine the delay's impact on the benchmark's score.