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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!news.hawaii.edu!news.uoregon.edu!news-res.gsl.net!news.gsl.net!EU.net!usenet2.news.uk.psi.net!uknet!tank.news.pipex.net!pipex!news.mathworks.com!newsgate.duke.edu!godot.cc.duq.edu!newsfeed.pitt.edu!scramble.lm.com!news.math.psu.edu!news.cse.psu.edu!news.ecn.bgu.edu!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!news.eecs.uic.edu!not-for-mail From: jscholvi@bert.eecs.uic.edu (John Scholvin) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Q: What exactly does the time command tell me? Date: 12 Jun 1996 11:33:35 -0500 Organization: University of Illinois at Chicago Lines: 33 Message-ID: <4pmrgv$6kv@bert.eecs.uic.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: bert.eecs.uic.edu Hi, everyone. The subject about covers it: I'm running some fairly long simulations for my master's thesis, and I need to know how long it's taking them to run. The time(1) command prints out three things: "real" time, "user" time, and "system" time. I've gathered that "real" time is wall clock time, and that "system" time is the amount of time the process in question spends in kernel. I would think that the "user" time is the number I'm interested in, how much time the processor is actually spending on my program, right? The problem is that the user number is sometimes much less than the real number, and the computer isn't really doing much else. For example, on one run I got 21935.54 real 2866.26 user 28.19 sys This is strange...there are about 5 hours unaccounted for there, and this was on an overnight run on a system with *very* little else going on. I mean, basically nothing except xperfmon++ and xclock. I'm the only user, the computer is not on a network, and I walk away while it's running. Is xperfmon++ the guilty party? Could it be the screen saver, beforelight? Am I confused? :) Specifics: FreeBSD 2.0.5 on a Gateway 2000 4DX2-66 with 16MB RAM and a swap space of 64MB. Thanks to everyone on the FreeBSD team for providing such a solid platform for me to develop this monster on! -- John Scholvin i'm the number on your kitchen door jscholvi@eecs.uic.edu i'm the baseball team from baltimore http://www.eecs.uic.edu/~jscholvi/ --buffalo tom