Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by auraham 1275 days ago
Side note: Can somebody explain the difference between real, user, and sys? I understand that real is basically the time spent from start to finish (which can be affected by other processes), whereas user and sys consider the amount of time where the CPU was actually busy running a program (not waiting for other things like I/O). For example, what is the meaning of user and sys from this example? [1]:

    $ time wget https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/6.1.28/virtualbox-6.1_6.1.28-147628~Ubuntu~eoan_amd64.deb

    real   0m8.515s
    user   0m0.125s
    sys    0m0.487s
According to [2], user + sys would be a better measurement than real for comparing Python, Cython, and C++.

[1] https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/linux-time-command

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10265162/the-meaning-of-...

1 comments

Author here. Thanks for your comment. You are completely right. I will add a remark to the article regarding this.