On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 5:58 PM, Bruce Dawson <brucedaw...@cygnus-software.com> wrote: > The man page is clear that it is displaying the results of wait3(). However > it doesn't mention that this means that sub-process startup time is not > accounted for. That's what I feel should be clarified. Otherwise a CPU bound > task may appear to not be CPU bound. > > My expectation is that the sum of 'user' and 'sys' time should equal the > elapsed time because the overall task is 100% CPU bound (I've confirmed > this). It is unfortunate that the sub-process startup time is not accounted > for in 'user' or 'sys' time, and I think it would be appropriate to document > this.
I'm not sure these are not taken into account, my guess is that the difference between real and sys+user can well be due to the other processes of your system trying to run
