*BSD News Article 71009


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From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Q: What exactly does the time command tell me?
Date: 14 Jun 1996 23:33:27 GMT
Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden
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jscholvi@bert.eecs.uic.edu (John Scholvin) wrote:

> 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?

No, you are interested in s+u.  ``system time'' is the time that is
accounted on behalf of your process running in system mode (i.e.
syscall processing that is done on behalf of your process; as opposed
to interrupt processing which is not done on behalf of any process).

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)