For my Operating Systems course in my undergraduate Computer Science program in California University of Pennsylvania, our group had a series of assignments dependent on running a VirtualBox in Oracle. One of the most difficult assignments involved doing benchmark testing of whether recursive or iterative methods ran faster. This assignment was more complex than standard assignments from previous courses because it entailed more research outside of the regular program testing. It was imperative to use step wise development in order to complete the assignment properly, because it allowed our team to break down the whole assignment into more manageable tasks on a schedule.

Of course, the first thing I had decided to do was to make sure all the tasks were split up evenly between team members. We ended up with a parent process and two children. The parent would spawn the children after receiving an integer from the user by forking. The parent also set up a message queue and would wait while the child processes were running. The first child would calculate the factorial number given by the user recursively, outputting the time taken to the screen. The second child would use that same number but calculate using iteration. …show more content…
The next portion involved researching and more testing of our team's code. I ran multiple tests of the code within the VirtualBox environment, and built a table listing the test run, child 1 time, child 2 time, and user input. The purpose was to question whether iteration or recursive methods were faster and therefore more efficient. However, the results from the benchmarking tests showed that iterative methods were calculated more quickly when the data consisted of smaller numbers. But, not satisfied with that answer, I had also extended my testing to include much larger